Ken Macleod - The Sky Road

She was even named, in the small print of the caption.

It could be an ancestor, I tried to tell myself, as Gantry thought. But I knew it was not so. If anyone could be identified from a photograph, Merrial could. She looked, in the picture, no different from how she looked this day.

I had, from the first moment I’d seen her, thought her younger, fierier, fresher than myself, and attributed her occasional ironies and unreasonably intelligent remarks to her native wit, which I was quite unenviously happy to regard as greater than my own. It was a shock to realise that they were the wisdom of age. Dear God, how old was she? She had lived since the Deliverer’s time! The thought was enough to make me feel dizzy.

Gantry was right about one thing—1 had seen this picture before, on an idle trawl through the Institute’s public-relations archive. And, as I had anticipated, the memory of seeing it did come back. It had only been a few seconds’ pause as I’d turned the pages, a couple of years earlier, my attention momentarily caught by this pretty image from the past.

Fergal’s voice broke into my appalled reflections.

“Bad news from home?”

I shook my head, folding the letter around the booklet again, inserting the sheets in the envelope and slipping it into my pocket.

“No, no,” I said, forcing a smile. “Nothing like that. It’s just—1 feel faint, I think I’ve had too much to drink, on an empty stomach, you know?”

I clapped my hand to my mouth.

“Oh God.” I swallowed. The tinker’s sardonic, sceptical eyes regarded me. I realised that I had still to decide what to do about another shock, delivered only minutes earlier: that he—apparently with Mer-rial’s expectation—had put the AI on the ship. All it would take to expose him, and blast whatever schemes either or both of them had hatched, would be a word to Druin…

“You sure you’re all right?”

“Yeah, I’ll be fine. I just need some fresh air. I’m going out. Could you tell Menial to come out too?”

“Sure,” he said, already scanning the crowd for other company. “Where’ll you be?”

“In the square,” I said. “At the statue.”

To Almaty then, and apple-blossom on the streets, smoke in the air, and the Tian-Shan mountains beyond; so high, so close they were improbable to the eye, like the moon on the horizon. Myra almost skipped with relief to be back in Kazakhstan.

President Chingiz Suleimanyov’s office was a lot grander than Myra’s. She felt a tremor of trepidation as she walked past the soldier who held the door open for her. A ten-metre strip of red carpet over polished parquet, at the end of which was a small chair in front of a large desk. The chair was plastic. The desk was mahogany, its green leather top bare except for a gold Mont Blanc pen and a pristine, red-leather-edged blotter. Glass-paned bookcases on either side of the room converged to a wide window with a mountain view. The room’s central chandelier, unlit at the moment, looked like a landing-craft from an ancient and impressive alien civilisation making its presence known.

The President stood up as she came in, and walked around his intimidating desk. They met with a handshake. Suleimanyov was a short, well-built Kazakh with a face which he’d carefully kept at an avuncular-looking fiftyish. He was actually in his fifty-eighth year, a child of the century as he occasionally mentioned, which meant that he’d grown up after the Glorious Counter-Revolution of 1991 had passed into history. The reunification of Kazakhstan in the Fall Revolution had been his finest hour, and he always called himself a Kazakhstani, not a Kazakh: the national identification, not the ethnic. He didn’t have any of Myra’s twentieth-century leftist hang-ups. He had never had the slightest pretension to being any kind of socialist. However, he followed Soviet tradition by wearing the neatest and most conventional business-suit that dollars could buy.

“Good afternoon, Citizen Davidova,” he said, in Russian. She responded similarly, and then he waved her to her seat and resumed his own. The soldier closed the door.

“Ah, Myra my friend,” Suleimanyov said, this time in BBC World Service English, “let’s drop the formality. I’ve read your reports on your mission.” He gestured with his hands as though letting a book fall open. “What a mess. Though I must say you are looking good.”

“I’m sorry that I was not more successful, President Suleimanyov—”

“Chingiz, please. And no need to apologise.” He pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes for a moment. He looked tired. “I don’t see how anyone else could have done better. Your action in leaving Great Britain was perhaps… impetuous, but even with hindsight it will probably turn out to have been for the best. What a long way down they’ve come, the English. As for the Americans—well, what can I say?” He chuckled, with a certain schadenfreude, and gazed upwards at the crystal mother-ship. “Fifteen years ago they were stamping their will on the whole planet, and now a few nuclear weapons are too hot for them to handle. In my father’s time they were willing to contemplate taking multiple nuclear hits themselves.” He looked back from his reminiscence to Myra. “Sorry,” he said, suddenly abashed, “no offence intended. I forget sometimes that you were— are— an American.”

“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.”