by Ken MacLeod
“Yeah,” said Jason grimly. “And every army in the world, too. They’re so dependent on space-based comms and sims that they’ll be fucked. Except for the marginals, the Greens, the barbarians and the Sheenisov.” He laughed. “If that doesn’t scare them, nothing will.”
The guards at the window were moving from the sides to the centre, gazing out with complete lack of concern for cover. One of them turned around.
“The cavalry has arrived,” he said.
For a moment Myra thought he meant the Sheenisov. Then she realised that Chingiz had come through on his promise, and that the cavalry was their own.
The steppe at nightfall was a moving mass of vehicles and horses. As far as Myra knew, every last person in Kapitsa was moving out. She rode somewhere near the front; she tried to ride at the front, but she kept being overtaken by people in vehicles faster than her black mare. The Sovnarkom rump, and Jason and her mujahedin, rode in jeeps beside her. With her eyeband image-intensifiers at full power she could see the Kazakhstani cavalry—horse and motorised—outriding either flank of the evacuation, or migration. The scene was biblical, exodus and apocalypse in one. Banners and flags from the Revolution Square demonstration floated above the crowd, used as rallying points and mobile landmarks. The news remotes and reporters were following the process in a sort of stunned awe, not sure whether the angle was Road People (refugees, pathetic) or Kazakh Rouge (menaces, fanatic).
Something similar, though not as yet so drastic, was happening in Almaty and other towns across the greater Republic. Chingiz Suleimanyov had pitched the appeal to evacuate as the ultimate protest march, against the West’s threats and its refusal of aid against the Sheenisov. If they were to be abandoned to the communists, they had nothing to lose by fleeing in advance to a place that claimed it would be defended. The threat of this avalanching into an unstoppable migration was already spreading panic in Western Europe. Northward, in the Former Union, regional and local chiefs were conferring on their own fragmentary networks, bruiting inflammatory talk of joining in.
“Come in, come in, ya bastard,” Myra muttered. She was riding in a hallucinatory ambience of virtual images, some of them pulled down from CNN and other services, others patched up from the command-centre, whose hardware they’d stripped from the offices and jury-rigged in the back of the Sovnarkom jeep. She could see a satellite image of herself from above—she could wave, and with a second’s delay see one of the dots on the ground wave back. (The reassuring thing was that it was the wrong dot, a hologram fetch of herself and her surroundings seamlessly merged with the images from several kilometres distant.) She could see her own face, projected to visual displays around the world by the camcopter hovering a few metres in front of her.
Right now she was trying to raise Logan. A residual loyalty to her former comrades in space impelled her to warn them of the probable imminent disaster. The scanning search of the Lagrange cluster wasn’t picking up New View. At length, frustrated, she switched to a broader sweep, and to her surprise connected almost immediately.
“Jesus fuck, Myra,” Logan said, without preliminary pleasantry. “This is your biggest fuck-up since the Third World War.” He didn’t make it sound like an accusation.
“Thanks for the reminder, comrade,” Myra snarled. “I’m going against my better judgement telling you this, but I’ve fallen out with your General. That little electric fucker has had the bright idea of making his own bid for world revolution, and I don’t intend to wait around to see how it all works out in practice, thank you very much.”
Tes, I had heard,” Logan said heavily. The delay seemed longer than usual; Myra guessed because she was strung out, running on stretched time. “You called to say that?” He sounded distracted. A very pretty black girl who looked about ten years old stuck her face past his, grimacing at the camera, filling its field with her microgravity sunburst of frizzy hair. Logan shoved at her.
“Oh, push off, Ellen May,” he said, not unkindly. “Go and pester your mum, OK? Or Janis. She’ll have something for you to do, you bet.”
The girl stuck out her tongue, then flicked away like a fish.
“Kids,” Logan grinned, indulgent despite himself.
“Yeah, they’re great,” Myra said, with a pang. “What I called you for is about that, actually. If that kid’s gonna have a future, you guys better get your ass out of Lagrange.”
“We have,” said Logan, five seconds later. “We raced through our preparations after the coup. We haven’t got as much gear as we’d like, but the asteroid miners are going to swing in and join us there. We finished the burn twelve hours ago.” He looked about. “Made a real mess of stuff I didn’t have time to lash down,” he added sadly.
^You’re on your way to Mars?”
“Yes, at last.” His grin filled the screen. “Free at last!”
“What does the General think about this?”
“Ah,” said Logan. “When I found it was bidding to use your orbital nukes in the coup, I figured the same as you did. Not safe to stick around. You remember I said we’d have to leave a few hundred tons behind? Well, it’s among them, still in the clutter at Lagrange. We ditched the bugger.” His triumphant smile faded to a bleak inward gaze. “I hope.”
Ts it still in control of the Mil Org?”
“I guess so. We couldn’t do anything to it, beyond discarding the section the hardware was in. Its software is a different matter, it gets everywhere, but, hell—”
“What do you mean ‘it gets everywhere’? I’ve got a suspicion it’s downloaded to the Sheenisov’s weird Babbage engines, but—”
Logan nodded. Teah, and it’s probably copied its files to anything of yours that’s been in contact with it, like your phone, but it’s just the source code, it can’t do any harm so long as you don’t open the file—”
At that point the connection ended.
Myra took her phone from her pocket and was about to jerk its jack from her eyeband, just in case, when she realised the precaution was irrational. If the bugger was actually running on her phone they were doomed already. She thought about the time the General had appeared right in her own command-centre, and could only hope that Logan was right, and that only its source code, and not its live program, had been secreted there. And in other places…
Someday, somebody would open a file stored in the Institute at Glasgow, and find Parvus, and the General behind him. She wished that person luck. Then she remembered Menial MacClafferty, and realised she’d have to do more.
She had just finished rattling out her urgent message when she heard a dull, distant bang behind her, and turned. Through the eyeband’s night vision she saw on the horizon the expanding green glow of the first cruise missile to hit Kapitsa. It was not the last.
Hours later, in the twenty-below midnight, when most of the migration had camped around fuel-dump fires, Myra was sitting with Jason in front of a portable electric brazier, in the shelter of the dozing horse. She was simultaneously in the command-centre with the others, and with Chingiz. The UN and US had never intended to negotiate, and even the pretence had been dropped.
The Kazakhstani airforce was expending missiles, planes and lives above Almaty now. From space the command-centre was pulling down images of moves from the battlesats. Tiny, manned hunter-gatherer probes were burning off, matching orbits and velocities with the cached nukes. They had hunter-killer escorts, and they were obviously from opposed coalitions—already their exchanges of fire were being replayed on CNN, now that the Kapitsa bombardment had stopped for lack of remaining targets.
“… no choice,” Chingiz was saying. “Our first responsibility is to defend our people, the people we’ve taken on the duty to protect, even if that means killing more innocent people on the other side than would die on ours if we don’t.”
That’s talking, thought Myra, that’s the way to look at it, that’s right. Screw the greatest good of the greatest number. Or maybe not.
“That’s the end of the world,
” said Valentina.
“It’s ending anyway,” Myra said. She looked up from the fire. “That’s my final analysis! We may even save lives in the long run, if we blind and cripple the forces that are getting ready for the last war.” She laughed bitterly. “In both senses of the phrase.”
An officer leaned into the visual field around Chingiz, and spoke urgently in his ear. Chingiz nodded, once, then raised his hand.
“This is it,” he said. “Some of the space settlers’ diamond ships have just entered the atmosphere. They’re heading for—”
Connection lost.
Myra jumped up, and to her utter horror and amazement she saw them, jinking and jittering through the sky towards her. Their infrared radiation signature was arrogantly clear—they didn’t need to bother with shielding, unlike the stealth fighters they resembled. One moment they were dots on the horizon, the next they were discs overhead, swooping past at a thousand metres. Their laser lances slashed the vast encampment, and were countered seconds too late by futile fusillades of skyward machine-gun fire. Then they were at the other horizon, andbanking around for a second runscreams of people and beasts in the night, dying under the laser beams and the humming rain of their own misdirected, falling ordnance Earth versus the flying saucers! Way cool!
Myra shook off that mad thought and reached for the command-centre controls as though through thick mud. Valentina’s eyes shone in the firelight for a moment, and Myra saw in them a reflection of her own resolution. Then she and Valentina stooped together to their task. As Myra rattled through the codes, she waited for the laser’s hot tongue on her neck.
The diamond ships were far too fast for human control, or even for their enhanced, superhuman occupants. Their main guidance systems were realtime uplinks to the space stations, which a few good nuclear explosions could disrupt.
The sky went white, and the black discs fell like leaves.
The ablation cascade did not happen all at once. Lagrange went to eternity instantaneously, in one appalling sphere of hell-hot helium fusion, but Earth orbit was a different thing. Hours, perhaps days, would pass before the last product of human ingenuity and industry was scraped from the sky. Even so, the comsats were among the first to fail. Most, indeed, were taken out by the electromagnetic pulses alone. Riding into the first dawn of the new world, Myra knew that the little camcopter dancing a couple of metres in front of her might well be relaying the last television news most of its watchers would ever see.
Behind her, in a slow straggle that ended with the ambulances and litters of the injured and dying, the Kazakh migration spread to the horizon. The sun was rising behind them, silhouetting their scattered, tattered banners. There was only one audience, now, that was worth speaking to: the inheritors.
“Nothing is written,” she said. “The future is ours to shape. When you take the cities, spare the scientists and engineers. Whatever they may have done in the past you need them for the future. Let’s make it a better one.”
The camcopter spun around, soared, darted about wildly and dived into the ground. The horses’ hooves, the worn tyres of the vehicles, crushed it in seconds. Myra wasn’t worried; she could see her own image, with a few seconds’ delay, appearing in the corner of her eyeband where CNN still chattered away. The rest of the field was filled with bizarre hallucinations, the net’s near-death experience.
God filled the horizon, bigger than the sunrise.
15
The Hammer’s Harvest
I sat on the plinth of the statue of the Deliverer, and smoked a cigarette to fight my stomach’s heaves. Gradually my mind and my body returned to some kind of equilibrium. The din of the launch celebrations, the lights of the houses and pubs, became again something I could regard without disgust and hear without dismay. I stood up, and the ground was steady under my feet. I looked up, and the sky was dark and starry above my head.
I walked a few steps from the statue and turned around. The Deliverer on her horse reared above me. Menial had told me, a couple of weeks earlier, the reason why the Deliverer’s features varied on all the statues I’d ever seen. She was a myth, a multiplicity. Her hordes had never ridden from far Kazakhstan to Lisbon’s ancient shore, as the songs and stories say. They had never swept all before them. Instead, each town and city had been invaded by a horde raised closer to home, on its very own hinterland. How many hundred, how many thousand towns had met the new order in the form of a wild woman on a horse, riding in at the head of a ragtag army to proclaim that the net was thrown off, the sky was fallen, and the world was free?
It was that final message, the last ever spoken from the net and the screens, that had identified them with that singular woman, the Deliverer. I leaned forward, to read again the words chiselled on this plinth, as it is on them all, from far Kazakhstan to Lisbon’s ancient shore:
NOTHING IS WRITTEN. THE FUTURE IS OURS TO SHAPE. WHEN YOU TAKE THE CITIES, SPARE THE SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS. WHATEVER THEY MAY HAVE DONE IN THE PAST YOU NEED THEM FOR THE FUTURE. LET’S MAKE IT A BETTER ONE.
The last words of the old world, and the first of the new.
I thought of Menial, and took another step back, still drawing on my cigarette. She was older than I had ever imagined possible. But she was also, I realised, still as young as she’d seemed when I’d first seen her. Nothing had changed, nothing could change that lovely, eager, open personality. She was not old, she had merely… stayed young.
As I would.
What did I have to complain about?
I laughed at myself, at my own youthful folly. In the long view of history, in the promise of a long life to come, the difference in our chronological age, however great, could only be insignificant.
A step, a swish, a scent. Her warm, dry hand clasped mine.
“Are you all right, Clovis?”
I turned and looked at her, and drew her towards the plinth. We sat down.
“Menial,” I said, “I know who you are.”
“Oh,” she said. “And who am I?”
I handed her the booklet, open at the page.
She sat for a long moment looking down at it, with a slight smile and a slowly welling tear.
“Ah, fuck,” she said. “Everybody else there is long gone, as far as I know. But maybe I wouldn’t know, as they wouldn’t know about me.” She sniffed, and handed the booklet back. “So now you know. I never wanted to be what people would expect of me, if they knew.”
“But you are,” I said. “You knew about the AI, and you expected Fergal to do what he did. I saw your face when he said it, and it was like you’d just cracked a piece of white logic.”
“Or black! Aye, I knew. The Deliverer told me about it herself, just before the end. She warned me that it was a dangerous thing, though benign according to its lights. Like Fergal!”
“But why did you give it to him?”
Menial leaned back and looked up. “Because the deadly debris is up there, colha Gree. I know what happened at the Deliverance, because I lived through it. I saw the flashes. I was there when the sky fell. I knew the ship would never get through without a much better guidance system than the one I was working on—well, I knew by the time I’d finished testing it, which was not that long ago. I needed someone to find the AI under cover of seeking something else, and I needed someone who’d put it on the ship—for good reasons or bad.”
She lowered her gaze and smiled. “So here we are. And now it’s you who has to decide, mo grdidh. That ship’s success will stimulate others, from other lands as well, from the Oriental and the Austral states. Competition between companies and continents, great revolutions to come, and the sky road before us. If it’s not launched, or its new mind is ripped out and it fails, or if indeed the AI is not smart enough to save it, then it’ll be a long time before it’s tried again. And the next to try might not be as benevolent as the International Scientific Society. It could be an army, or an empire.”
She grabbed my shoulders and gazed at me. “If you walk in there
and tell Druin and his boys, that’s what could still happen.”
I closed my eyes. T can see that,” I said, “but I’m more concerned about the power Fergal, or someone like him, might have.”
“Open your eyes,” Menial said.
She was looking very serious. “That thing, the AI, the planner, it can only do what people let it tell them to do. Fergal said there are no such people yet. What he should have said is, there are no such people any more. Your people, colha Gree, they are not the types to let themselves be ordered about by communists—because they have never been ordered about by anyone!”
“Ah!” I said, suddenly understanding. “Because of the Deliverance, and the Deliverer!”
Menial laughed.
“ ‘No saviours from on high deliver’,” she said wryly. “Your people delivered themselves. That’s another thing I saw, and I’ll tell you about one day. If you’re still with me.”
“Oh, yes,” I said. “I’m still with you.”
“Good,” she said. “We have a lot to do and a long time to do it in.”
She looked around pointedly. The square was jumping.
“So, colha Gree, are you going to ask me for a dance?”
“Of course,” I said. “Would you do me the honour?”
For a second before we whirled away I stared at the scene before me, fixing it in my memory. Behind the statue Mars was rising, a blue-green dot in the East. Whatever became of the ship, whether it soared to a safe orbit or was blasted to smithereens, other ships would get out there somehow, on the sky road.
Whatever the truth about the Deliverer, she will remain in my mind as she was shown on that statue, and all the other statues and murals, songs and stories: riding, at the head of her own swift cavalry, with a growing migration behind her and a decadent, vulnerable, defenceless and rich continent ahead; and, floating bravely above her head and above her army, the black flag on which nothing is written.
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