by Ken MacLeod
“Fighting on the perimeter. Damage to the runways. Just Green partisans, nothing serious, but there’s no chance you’ll get your flight on Monday.”
“Oh, shit. Book me a train. For tomorrow, OK? Catch you later.”
She disengaged the cable link and let it roll back. Then she got to work labelling the stacks, dating the paper folders and making notes for the Institute’s archivist.
Somebody clattered up the stairs, strode into the library and flicked the light on. Myra turned around sharply and met the surprised gaze of the girl who’d identified her at the demo.
“Oh!” said the girl. She slowly slid her tartan scarf from around her neck and flicked her long, thick black hair out from under her denim jacket’s collar. “What—what are you doing here?”
Myra straightened up, feeling irrationally pleased that she was marginally taller than the younger woman.
“I was about to ask you the same question,” she said.
“I work here! I’m a post-grad student.”
She said it with such confusion of face, such a widening of her big brown eyes, that Myra couldn’t help but smile.
“And a political activist, too, I understand.”
The girl nodded firmly. “Aye.” The comment seemed to have allowed her self-confidence to recover. She stepped over to a chair and sat, stretching her legs out and propping her boots on a book-caddy. Myra observed this elaborately casual behaviour with detached amusement.
“I was an activist myself, when I studied here,” Myra said, half-sitting on the edge of the table.
“I know,” the girl said coldly. “I’ve read your thesis. Detente and Crisis in the Soviet Economy.”
Myra smiled. “It still stands up pretty well, I think.”
Teah. Can’t say the same about your politics, though.” She frowned, swinging her feet back to the floor and leaning forward. “In a way it’s nothing… personal, you understand? I mean, when I read what you wrote, I like the person who wrote it. What I can’t do is square that with what you’ve become.”
That was laying it on the line! Myra felt a jolt of pain and guilt.
“I don’t know if I can, either,” she said. “I changed. Real politics is more complicated than—ah, fuck it. Look—uh, what’s your name?”
“Menial MacClafferty.”
“OK- Menial. The fact is, the Russian Revolution got defeated, and never got repeated—perhaps because the defeat was so devastating that it made any subsequent attempt impossible.” She laughed harshly. “And like the man said, it’s gonna be socialism or barbarism. Socialism’s out the window, it was dead before I was born. So barbarism it is. We’re fucked.”
Menial was shaking her head. “No, nothing’s inevitable. We make our own history—the future isn’t written down. ‘The point is to change it.’ Look at the Sheenisov, they’re building a real workers’ democracy, they’ve proven it’s still possible—and what do you do? You fight them! On the side of the Yanks and the Kazakhstani capitalists.”
“Like I said,” Myra sighed. “Real politics is complicated. Real lives, mine and those of the people I’ve taken responsibility for. The future may not be written but the past bloody well is, and it hasn’t left me with many options.”
“You mean, you haven’t left yourself-—”
“Tell you what,” Myra said, suddenly annoyed. She waved at the stack of cardboard and paper around her. “Here’s my life. There’s a lot more on the computer.” She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. “Password’s ‘Luxemburg and Parvus’ for the easy stuff. You’re welcome to all of it. The hard stuff, the real dirty secrets, I’ve put a hundred-year embargo on, and even after that it’ll be the devil of a job to hack past it. If you’re still around in a couple of centuries, give it a look.”
“This is what you’re doing?” Merrial asked. “Turning over your archives to the Institute? Why?”
Myra could feel her lips stretch into a horrible grin. “Because here it has a very slightly better chance of surviving the next few weeks, let alone the next few centuries. You want my advice, kiddo, you stop worrying about socialism and start getting ready for barbarism, because that’s what’s coming down the pike, one way or another.”
Merrial stood up and glared down at Myra. “Maybe you’ve given up, but I won’t!”
“Well, good luck to you,” said Myra. “I mean that.”
The young woman looked at her with an unreadable expression. “And to you, I suppose,” she said ungraciously, and turned on her heel and stalked out. Whether automatically or deliberately, she switched off the light as she went. Myra blinked, fiddled with her eyeband and got back to work.
“Everything all right?” Irina Guzulescu was limned in the backlight of the library doorway.
Myra straightened up and dusted off her hands.
“Yeah, I’m doing fine, thanks.” She laughed. “Sorry about the dark, I was using my eyeband to see with, instead of putting the light on.”
“Probably just as well,” the small woman said. She advanced cautiously into the room, past the opened crates and labelled stacks of Myra’s archives. “Some of the books in here are so fragile, I fear sometimes one photon could…” She smiled, and handed Myra a mug of coffee.
“Oh, thanks.” It was cold in the library’s still, stale air. She clasped her hands around the china’s warmth. “Is there anywhere I can go for a smoke?” she asked.
“Oh, sure, come on down to the basement.”
The basement seemed hardly changed; the big table that took up most of the room brought back memories—the long discussions and arguments around it, the adventures planned there, the afternoon she’d talked with Jon and Dave, and gone with Jon.
Along the way, Irina had picked up her own mug at the kitchenette cubby-hole. She sat down opposite Myra and shoved an ashtray across the table. In the unforgiving light she looked older; she’d obviously had the treatments, but the weight of her years still pulled at her face; it didn’t sag, but it showed the strain.
“Well,” Myra said, lighting up, “uh, that thing you said? About the place being watched? Why’s that?”
Irina moved her hand as though flicking ash. “Police mentality,” she said. “Obviously if we study the post-civilised, we’re potentially sympathetic to them, and to the enemy within.”
“The what?”
“The Greens.” Irina laughed. “The FU and the Greens, it’s like it used to be with the SU and the Reds. In the good old days of the Cold War, being interested in the other side at all was suspect, no matter how useful it might be. And of course the same on the other side.” She smiled. T worked at the Institute of American Studies in Bucharest. Securitate on my case all the time.”
Jesus. You must be nearly as old as I am.” Myra thought the remark tactless as soon as it was out of her mouth, but Irina preened herself at it.
“Older,” she said proudly. “I’m a hundred and ten.”
“Wow. Hundred and five, myself. Had the earlier treatments, of course, but I’ve just had the nano job.”
“Ah, good for you, you won’t regret it.” She smiled distandy. “You know, Myra Godwin, you are part of the history. Of this Institute, and of the societies it was set up to study. I supervised a student a few years ago in a PhD thesis on the ISTWR.”
“Never thought I’d end up in charge of my very own deformed workers’ state.” A dark chuckle. “Not that I ever believed that’s what it was, or is,” Myra hastened to add. “Or that such a thing could exist. Ticktin cured me of that delusion a long time ago.”
“Hmm,” said Irina. “It was Mises and Hayek for me, actually. Ticktin didn’t rate them very highly. Or me.” She laughed. “Used to call me ‘Ceauşescu’s last victim’.”
“Well, yes,” Myra said. “Never found the liberals terribly persuasive myself, to be honest. The question that always used to come to mind was, ‘Where are the swift cavalry?’ ”
Irina shook her head. “I’m sorry?”
“Oh, it was s
omething Mises said. If Europe ever went socialist, it would collapse, and the barbarians would be back, sweeping across the steppe on swift horses. Well, half Europe was—not socialist as I would see it, but as Mises would see it—and where are the swift cavalry?”
Irina stared at her. As though unaware of what she was doing—the reflexes of a habit she must have thought was conquered coming back—she reached across the table for Myra’s cigarettes and lit one up.
“Oh, Myra Godwin-Davidova, you are so blind. Where are the swift cavalry, indeed.” She paused, narrowing her eyes against the stream of smoke.
“What mode of production would you say exists in the Former Union?”
“The post-civilised mode?”
“A euphemism.” She waved smoke. “What would your Engels call a society where cities are just markets and camps, where most people eat what they can grow and hunt for themselves, where almost all industry is at the village level, where there is no notion of the nation?”
“Well, OK, it’s an old-fashioned term,” Myra said, with half a laugh, “but I suppose technically you could call it barbarism. Technologically advanced barbarism, but yes, that’s what it is.”
“Precisely,” Irina said. She looked at her cigarette with puzzled distaste and stubbed it out. “There are your swift cavalry. Look outside our cities, at the Greens. In fact, look inside our cities. There are your swift cavalry!”
Myra really had never thought of it like that.
“The only swift cavalry I’m worried about,” she said bitterly, “are the goddamn Sheenisov.”
To her astonishment and dismay, Irina began to cry. She pulled a grubby tissue from her pocket and sobbed and sniffled into it for a minute. On a sudden impulse, Myra reached across the table and grasped her hand.
“Oh God,” Irina said at last. “I’m sorry.” She gave a long sniff and threw the tissue away, accepted Myra’s offer of a cigarette.
“No, Fm sorry,” Myra said. T seem to have said something to upset you.”
Irina blinked several times. “No, no. It’s my own fault. Oh, God, if you just knew. I stayed here to see you, not just to let you in.” The cigarette tip glowed to a cone, she was sucking so hard. “Nobody else wanted to come in this morning and meet you. They think you are a terrible person, a monster, a criminal. I don’t—” She blinked again, brightening. “I go back, you know. To Romania, and to… other ‘post-civilised’ countries. All right, to the Former Union. And you know what? People are happy there, with their farms and workshops and their local armies and petty loyalties. The bureaucrats are gone, and the mafias have no prohibitions to get rich on, and they are gone. The provinces have their small wars and their feuds, but—” she smiled now, sadly “— I sound like a feminist, if you remember them, but the fact is, it’s just a testosterone thing. Young men will kill each other, that’s the way of it. For a woman, Moscow—hell, any provincial post-Soviet town—is safer than Glasgow.”
Oh, not another, Myra thought. A Green fellow-traveller, a political pilgrim. I have seen the past and it works.
“And when I see something like communism coming back,” Irina went on, “when I see the goddamn Sheenisov riding in their tanks, collectivising again, assimilating all those little new societies, I want to see them stopped.”
She looked straight into Myra’s eyes. “You can do it, you can stop them. You must fight, Myra. You’re our only hope.”
Myra felt like crying, herself.
The Brits just didn’t do trains.
They’d invented them. They had a couple of centuries’ experience with them. They had more actual enthusiasts for trains per head of the population than anywhere else. They’d invented trainspotting. And they still couldn’t seem to figure out how to make trains run on time.
So here they were on a bright, cold Sunday morning, somewhere south of Penrith, and under traction from one electric engine that sounded like it came from the sort of gadget you would use for home improvements. Wooded hillsides slid slowly past. At least she had a seat in First Class. The train’s guard was just wandering through the adjoining Second Class, where all the screaming kids were, and the refreshments trolley was being trundled along behind him.
Myra lit a cigarette and gazed out. She felt relatively content, even with a long journey, made longer by bloody typical Brit inefficiency, ahead of her. She had plenty of reading to do, right there in her eyeband. Parvus had prepared her a digest of recent British foreign policy, last time she’d done a download. About 100 kilobytes, not counting hyperlinks and appendices. Stacks of v-mail to catch up with.
Not to mention the news. By now there was a regular CNN spot, on the world-affairs specialist news-feed, dealing with the ISTWR. The demos opposing the policy of federation with Kazakhstan had grown to a daily assembly of two thousand or so, with a couple of hundred people braving the chilly nights in tents in Revolution Square. Some of their banners were what Myra would’ve expected from her local ul-tralefts, the sort of folks she’d tangled with outside the New Brit. Others were liberal—pro-UN—or libertarian, with a pro-space, pro-Outwarder undertone.
Nobody on the street—or on the net—seemed to have yet found out about the nukes; a small mercy, but Myra suspected that some at least of those behind the various demonstrators knew about them. Reid, for one, certainly did, and she thought it possible that his hand was reaching for them through the ISTWR’s home-grown space-movement militants.
Myra had spent the first hour or so of the journey at her virtual keyboard, writing out reports back and instructions and advice for her commissars, Denis Gubanov in particular. She wanted every chekist he could spare to get busy infiltrating and investigating these demos.
The partition doors hissed and thunked open. The guard came through, a tall, stooping man in a uniform, with a holstered pistol on his hip.
“Tickets from Carlisle, please.” He had a slightly camp voice, gentle and pleasant. He smiled and checked the tickets of the business executive sitting opposite and across from Myra.
“Scuse me,” the steward sang out, behind him. The steward was a small, scrawny youth in a white shirt, tartan bow-tie and trews. Spiky black hair.
The trolley rattled and jangled into the compartment. The guard stepped aside to let it pass. As he did so the train lurched a little, setting the trolley’s contents ringing again, and the brakes squealed as the train came to a halt.
There was a crackly announcement, from which Myra could only make out the words “trees on the line”.
A ripple of derision ran through the carriage. Myra added her hoot to it, and glanced out of the windows. There were trees beside the line, to the right, but they were about a hundred yards away, across a puddled meadow, On the other side, a sharp slope, with trees above the scree.
She heard a gasp from the steward, and a sort of cough from the guard. A large quantity of some red liquid splashed across the table she was sitting at, and some of it poured over the edge and on to the lap of her skirt. Myra recoiled, looking up with a momentary flash of civilised annoyance—her first impression was that somehow the steward had spilled a bottle of red wine over her.
The guard fell sideways across the table with a shocking thud. His throat gaped and flapped like a gillnslit, still pumping. She could see the rim of his severed windpipe, white, like broken plastic. His mouth was open too, the tongue quivering, dripping spitde. His eyes were very wide. He raised his head, and looked as though he were trying to say something to her. Then he stopped trying. His head hit the table with a second thump, diminuendo.
The steward was still standing, clutching a short knife in one hand and an automatic pistol, evidendy the guard’s, in the other. His shirtcuff had blood on it, as did the front of his shirt. It looked like he’d had a nose-bleed which he’d tried to staunch on his sleeve. It was surprising how thin a liquid blood was, when it was freshly spilled, still splashy, a wine-dark stream.
The steward flicked his tongue across his lips. He waved the pistol in a way th
at suggested he was not entirely familiar with its use. Then, in a movement like a conjuring trick, he’d swapped the knife and the pistol around and worked the slide. Lock and load; he knew how to use it, all right.
“Don’t fucking move,” he said.
Myra didn’t fucking move. She’d stuck her small emergency-pistol in the top of her boot when she’d taken off the holster with the Glock, which was now lying under her jacket on the luggage-rack above. There was no way she could reach either weapon in time. Nor could she blink up a comms menu on her eyeband—the phone was in her jacket, too. The other passenger, who was sitting across the aisle and facing the opposite direction, didn’t move either. Somebody, not a child, in the Second-Class compartment was screaming. The steward had his back to that compartment, and at least several people in there must have been aware of what had happened. Without moving her head, or even her eyes, Myra could see white faces, round eyes and mouths, through the glass partition.
She was thinking why doesn’t someone just shoot this fucker in the back? Then, out of the corner of her eye, she saw movement outside, along both sides of the train. Men and women on horseback. Long hair; feathers and hats; leather jerkins and weskits; rifles and crossbows brandished or slung. Like cowboys and Indians. Green partisans. Barbarians.
Far behind her, near the back of train she guessed, there was a brief exchange of fire and a distant, thin screaming. It went on and on like a car alarm.
Every door in the train, internal and external, thunked open. OK, so somebody’d got to the controls. Myra felt a cold draught against the warm and now sticky liquid on her knees. The colour washed out of the world. Myra realised that she was about to go into shock, and breathed hard and deep.
Some of the horsemen, dismounted, leapt aboard the train. At the end of each carriage, a pair of them faced opposite ways, covering the passengers with rifles. The man who landed facing Myra filled the partition doorway. “Barbarian” was not an epithet, applied to him; he was tall and broad, he had a beard and pony-tail gleaming with grease, and his jacket and chaps bore smooth-edged, irregularly shaped plates of metal attached to the leather with metal rings, a crude and partial armour.