by Ken MacLeod
“No offence taken,” Myra said. “I entirely agree with your assessment. What a crock of shit the place is! What a pathetic lot they are! The chance of a long life has only made them more afraid of death than ever.”
The President’s bushy eyebrows twitched. “It has not done that for you, then?”
Myra shook her head. “I can see the rationality of it—people think they have more life to lose if they have a long one to look forward to—but I think it’s a false logic. A long life of oppression or shame is worse than a short one, after all.”
She stopped, and looked at him quizzically. He smiled.
“True, we are not here to discuss philosophy,” he said. “Nevertheless, I’m happy that you think it better to die free than to live as slaves. We may get the chance some day, but let’s try to delay our heroic deaths for a bit, eh?”
“Yes indeed.” She wanted very badly to smoke, but the President was notoriously clean-living.
“Very well,” said Chingiz. “Something I did not tell you before… I arranged for other cadres with similarly relevant experience to make similar approaches to the governments of France, Turkey, Brazil and Guangdong. They have encountered a similar lack of interest. So we have to face the Sheenisov on our own. I need hardly tell you that we don’t stand much of a chance, over anything but the short term.”
“I have a suggestion,” Myra said. “If the West is unwilling to assist us, then to hell with them. Let’s cut a deal with the Sheenisov! All we want is our territorial integrity, their withdrawal from Semipalatinsk and access to the markets, trade routes and resources of the Former Union. What they want, presumably, is a passage across or to the north of Kazakhstan, as they make their way west to the Ukraine, which is the nearest soft target but still one that will take them many years, perhaps decades, to assimilate. I don’t think they’re ready to take on Muscovy or Turkey just yet. It strikes me that these aims are not incompatible.”
“Yes, yes,” Chingiz said, “the option of our switching sides has occurred to me, and to my Foreign Secretary. The difficulty is that no one has ever ‘cut a deal’ with the Sheenisov. They have no leader, or even leadership—at least, none that the world knows. They are indeed a horde, without a Great Khan like my namesake. That makes them difficult to deal with—in every sense.”
“Ah, come on,” Myra said, feeling bolder. “Even the anarchists had their Makhno. I don’t believe a leaderless horde could accomplish what they have, even in military terms. It’s applying guerilla tactics at the level of strategy and of main-force confrontation—that is novel, but it requires precise coordination. There is nothing random going on here.”
Chingiz’s lips set in a thin line for a moment. He shook his head. “A system without a centre can achieve more than we may intuitively expect, Myra.
That after all is the lesson of the twentieth century, no? It works in economics, and in nature, and to some extent in military affairs too.”
“Good point,” Myra said. She didn’t want to bring the deranged Green rumour about the General into this level of conversation. “Let’s assume they have no leadership. In order to have the co-ordination they display, they must have horizontal communication between the units, and some method of arriving at a common response… even if it’s only some social equivalent of excitation and inhibition in a neural network. In that case, any offer made to a sufficiently large unit would be spread through the rest, as would a response. It would still be worthwhile contacting them.”
“Hmm,” said Chingiz. He steepled his fingers. “And what do you propose? Walking towards them until they take notice, then talking to the first person able to understand you?”
“That’s about it.”
“It sounds dangerous, apart from anything else.”
“Actually, I propose announcing my intention beforehand, through whatever channels we have, then heading for Semipalatinsk.”
“Come, come,” said Chingiz. “Things are not that bad, not yet. You can still fly in, direct.”
“And out?”
“Oh, yes. Air-traffic control is still functioning. As are radio and television, on selected channels. It’s only computer interfaces that are being blocked—by physical cutting of landlines or by electromagnetic jamming. It’s incredibly differentiated stuff—very clever. We couldn’t do it.”
She peered at his calm face.
“What reports are we getting?”
“About life under the Sheenisov? Hah. In some respects, life goes on as normal. There are certainly no democidal activities. There are what the Sheenisov call reforms. Workplace democracy, and so forth. They are very insistent about that. Many businesses dependent on the net are failing—they either reorient to the Sheenisov internal communications system, whatever that is, or they pick up sticks and go, or they are expropriated on the grounds of abandonment.” He rubbed his hands. “Needless to say, this is giving our republic a temporary influx of people, of capital, and of comms gear and computer capacity. Some refugees are destitute, but not many.”
“Any willing to join the fight back?”
“No mass rallying to our armed forces, I must say. The usual dashnik emigre diversions—plotting, pleading, mounting sabotage expeditions, low-key terrorism. We don’t encourage it.” He rubbed a finger up and down the side of his nose. “Naturally, we try to prevent it… to the best of our ability, but our resources are quite inadequate for such a task.”
“But of course.” Myra smiled. “Could you raise me some muj? Two or three good men, not fanatics, not suicidal, but willing to take a risk and have a go if necessary. I’m still deeply reluctant to fly into Semey. Too much opportunity for an opportune mechanical failure—frankly, I’m getting a little paranoid about anything that’s computer controlled, on either side. So, if I may, I’d like to drive, with bodyguards.”
Ghingiz raised his eyebrows. “Drive all the way?”
“No, no. Fly to Karaganda, announce what I’m doing, then drive to Semey, bypassing the ISTWR.”
“Ah, yes.” He teased some of the hairs in one shaggy eyebrow back into place. “A little local difficulty there.” He sounded reproachful.
“The situation’s under control,” Myra said.
“Perhaps. But, on balance, I would suggest that you don’t go back there, or even bypass it by truck or jeep through the Polygon. Far more dangerous than flying.” He raised a hand, stilling her incipient protest. “I know what you mean about the computers, and flight control. I too have thought about this. You will get your bodyguards. You make your announcement, fly to Semey, then wander where you will until someone makes contact—which, as you say, someone surely will. You will pass on the proposals and await developments. Then you will fly from Semey back to Kapitsa, and either declare the conflict settled, or rally your people for their part in the common defence.” He smiled thinly. “Either way, your internal political problems will be over. Externally, however, it may turn out that the Sheenisov are not our most immediate problem…”
“Ah, yes,” said Myra. “The next move. Presumably at least one of the countries we made our offer to will start to worry about what we’re going to do with the nukes, and the option of disarming us will move up the agenda pretty damn quick.”
“Precisely,” said Chingiz. “The US-spacer nexus is the one we probably have to worry about most—as your friend in New York said, the space industrialists and settlers are understandably edgy on the subject.”
“They’re your nukes now,” Myra said. “We’ll go along with anything you say. Presumably you’d want us to stand them down and turn over the operational codes.”
Chingiz slammed his fist on his massive desk, making Myra jump.
“No!” he said. “We are not going to be pushed around. We are not going to give up our nukes without guarantees of military aid. And we are willing to threaten nuclear retaliation against any attack.”
“So you’re ready to go to the wire on this one?”
“Absolutely,” said Chi
ngiz. “To the wire. But not beyond.”
“All right,” said Myra. “We’ll go with you. We’ll see who blinks first.”
“Thank you,” said Chingiz. His face relaxed a little. “It’s a high-risk strategy, I know. But the endgame is upon us, and I for one am not going into it defenceless.”
Myra nodded.
“The best thing you can do,” she said, “is act as though you’re ready to wash your hands of us—of the ISTWR. Denounce and disown us—privately of course, on the hotline—and urge the UN or US or whoever to negotiate directly with us. That should buy us some time.”
“Only if they believe you’re mad enough to do it.”
Myra bared her teeth. “They will.”
Sernipalatinsk, or Semey, was a pleasant enough town, whose steppe location had let it spread out so much that even its taller buildings looked low, even its narrower streets wide. There was room in those broad streets for trees whose dusty leaves had been an object of suspicious Geiger-counter monitoring on her first visit, in the late 1980s. The good old days of the Nevada-Semipalatinsk Association against nuclear testing. Of all the betrayals she’d perpetrated against her youth, this one stung the most. Marxism, Trotskyism and socialism could go hang; it was the implacable naive humanist internationalism of that protest, its irrefutable medical and statistical basis, its sheer bloody outrage rooted in biology rather than ideology, which had been her purest, fiercest flame. She had thought nuclear weapons the vilest work of man, whose very possession contaminated, and whose mere testing was murderous.
Nurup Kerbayev and Mustafa Altynsaryn, her proudly counter-revolutionary bodyguards, strolled a polite step or two behind her, beards and bandoliers bristling, Kalashnikovs slung on their shoulders. Nurup was ethnically Kazakh-Russian; Mustafa looked more Mongoloid, almost Han Chinese. With their AKs and baggy pants and scuffed boots and bulging jackets they both looked just like counterrevolutionary bandits. They also looked like Sheenisov soldiery or the local population, whom the Sheenisov had encouraged to carry arms as a deterrent to counter-revolutionary banditry.
They walked down the streets and across the squares quite unchallenged, though one or two people gave Myra a curious glance, as though recognising her from her television appearance the previous evening. Apart from the parked tanks on the street-corners, around each of which a curious crowd, mainly of children and young people, fraternised with the relaxed-looking crew, the town so far showed litde sign of being caught up in a social revolution. It was the weird fighting-machines that were alarming. They stalked and lurched about like Martian invaders; but the locals treated them with casual familiarity, like traffic or street-furniture. Perhaps, Myra thought wryly, it was the absence of searing heat-rays and writhing metal tentacles that did the trick.
As well as those combat drones, big clunky calculating-machines were being installed, indoors in shop-fronts and factories, outdoors in the squares. Gears and teeth and crystal spheres, building to frenetic orreries of some alternate solar systern, Copernican with Ptolemaic epicyles. Nanotech dripped and congealed around the brass and steel, like epoxy that never quite set. Around noon Myra and her companions watched one being winched off a flatbed truck and placed carefully in a plaza below a cosmonaut monument.
“Fucking bizarre,” said Myra, half to herself, as a Sheenisov cadre clambered on to the plinth and began an explanatory harangue in Uzbek, not one of her languages.
“With this they will replace the market,” Nurup scoffed, under his breath. “God help us all.”
A lively market in soft drinks and hot food was already forming around the strange device. Nurup and Mustafa bought her Coke and kebabs, and themselves a hotdog each. Both talked quietly to the stall-keepers. Taking the food, they sat down on a bench and ate.
“There is much discontent,” Mustafa said eagerly.
“Bazaar gossip,” Nurup said. “Stall-keepers will tell you anything. They will tell the Sheenisov they love them.”
The two men argued obliquely but intensely for a few minutes about the prospects for terrorist action against the Sheenisov.
“We’re not here for that,” Myra reminded them. She shared out cigarettes, then together they walked out of the square. Neither of the men raised any questions about her random following of the streets, until they ended up at the bank of the broad Irtysh river. Flats on the opposite bank, a riverside walk on this. A small pleasure steamer chugged downriver, ferrying a calculating-machine on its promenade deck.
Myra leaned against a railing, gazing into the river. The two men leaned against the railing, looking the other way. People passed. After a few minutes of this Mustafa asked what was going on.
“Nothing,” said Myra, not turning around. “Or maybe something. I’m assuming we’ve been followed, or watched. I’m quite prepared to wait here for at least an hour. Make yourselves comfortable.”
But they were too edgy and too alert to be comfortable. The most they did was light another of her Dunhills. Myra slipped her eyeband down and was at once struck by a sense of deja vu, as the whole scene around her hazed over, sleeted with grey flecks. After a moment she realised the source of that sense of recognition—it reminded her of how she’d first seen towns like this, back in the 90s: through their Soviet pollution haze. She blinked, moved the eyeband up and down, tried to pick up the nets. Nothing but the grey snow. Even Parvus,. summoned from memory, looked frazzled by it.
Sheenisov jamming. Shit.
She’d just given up this experiment when she heard her name called. She turned. Shin Se-Ha and Kim Nok-Yung walked side by side by the pathway, waving to her.
“It’s all right,” she told her swiftly tense bodyguards. “I know these guys.”
She shook hands, smiling, with the Korean and the Japanese; introduced them to the Kazakhstanis. Discreet compliments on her rejuvenated appearance were exchanged with her admiration for their now healthier physiques. Even their relatively humane imprisonment had marked them, weighing them down with something which their new freedom—if freedom it was—had enabled them to shrug off. They walked taller. They confronted the Kazakhstani emigres unabashed.
“So, you are Sheenisov,” said Mustafa, in a disgusted tone.
“Lay off,” said Myra. “They’re OK We have to talk.”
“Yes,” said Nok-Yung. “We have to talk.”
It was a mild day, for the time of year. Not shirtsleeve weather, but comfortable if you dressed warm, as they all had. Myra indicated a semi-circle of benches in a concreted picnic area along the bank a little. The two ex-prisoners shrugged, then nodded.
Nok-Yung and Se-Ha sat on either side of her, the two bodyguards on separate benches a few metres away. Children, snug-wrapped in quilted satin bomberjackets and padded trousers, capered about and yelled, oblivious to the adults.
“So how are you getting on, in this brave new world?” Myra asked.
“We’re fine,” said Nok-Yung, his comrade nodding emphatically. “Our families are joining us soon, and in die meantime we have much to do.”
“You both got jobs?” Myra smiled.
“There are no jobs,” Se-Ha said primly. “There is work. We have been… co-opted, and we have been sent to talk to you.”
“Well, I had guessed this was hardly a coincidence,” Myra said. “But I had not expected to see you as Sheenisov cadre already.”
“It’s an open system,” Nok-Yung said. “Interesting contributions are quickly taken up; amplified; discussed.”
“The opposite of the nets, then,” Myra said. They laughed.
“And the opposite of the Leninist system,” Nok-Yung said earnestly. “Once you are in, you are in, there is no… apprenticeship? No candidacy, no working your way up. Past experience,” he added rather smugly, “counts.”
Myra flashed her eyebrows. No doubt the militant and the Marxist mathematician had found their niches quickly. Tm sure that’s all fascinating,” she said. “But I’m here to put a diplomatic proposal to the Sino-Soviet Union as a
whole. Can I do that, just by talking to you?”
“Yes.”
“Very well.” She put it to them, straight: the deal, the crossing corridors. Let the revolutionary horde flow around Kazakhstan, like a flood around a rock, and they could swamp the rest of the world, for all she cared. (Gould and would run into the sand, she did not say, but that was what she expected.)
They listened politely, now and then asking for clarification, making notes and doodling maps on hand-held slates that—while obviously information-retrieval devices—looked as though they were made of… slate. Se-Ha stood up.
“I must consult,” he said, nodded, and walked briskly away. Nok-Yung accepted a cigarette, and leaned back luxuriantly, sprawling out with his elbows on the back of the bench. He regarded Myra through narrow eyes and curling smoke.
“Why do you resist the SSU, Myra?” he asked mildly. “It is only democracy. It is only socialism. A means—and an end, compatible at last, after all the disasters and crimes done in the name of both.” He spread his hands. “There are no secrets here, no deceptions. When you were as young as you look—” he smiled “—you would have thought this revolution, this liberation more wonderful than your wildest dreams.”
“Don’t let my mujahedin friends hear you say that!” she warned, half in jest. She glanced over at Nurup Kerbayev. He smiled back, eyes and teeth flashing like knives.
“But you’re right,” she went on. “Let’s just say… I may look young again, but I’ve had a long, long life in the meantime. I’ve come to believe in myself, and in… my country, Kazakhstan. And I will not be assimilated, and nor will we.” She waved a hand around. “These people, they may seem… happy enough to wait and see. But deep down, no—just below the surface—they are seething with suspicion. They are not your Mongolians or Siberians, who God knows had it bad enough under Stalinism but who found everything since was worse. To the Kazakhs socialism means ‘the tragedy’ of the 1930s: the forced settlement, the famine. It means the nuclear tests, the cancers, the birth defects. They don’t want to be the subjects of any more experiments. And if you want to point to the ISTWR as a counterexample—that was a special case. A self-selected minuscule minority. Our socialism was always a joke, more black humour than Red. Trotskyism in one country—what a laugh!”