Fractions (73 page)

I stared at her. ‘How do you know?'

‘From your face,' she said. ‘I've seen that look before.'

I'd been in contact with Myra perhaps a score of times, in more than a score of years: when we'd had the Bomb, and on deals I'd brokered for the space movement in the Norlonto decades. There was a direct airship link between Alexandra Port and Baikonur, and I'd met her a few times when she was passing through, but most of our contact had been remote.

I reached for Annette's hand. ‘You're not
jealous
? Good God, it was seventy years ago!'

‘I know,' Annette said. She squeezed my hand. ‘And I know you love me. But you loved her, too. I think she was the only other woman you were ever in love with. And it's true what they say: love never dies. You can kill it, sure, but it never dies by itself.'

Her words may have echoed any number of sentimental songs and stories, but she spoke them as if they were a bitter, reluctantly accepted scientific truth. She laid a hand over my open mouth before I could protest, expostulate, explain.

‘It's all right,' she said. Then: ‘What does she want this time?'

‘I don't know,' I said. I explained about the message, and where I'd found it. ‘She's in some kind of trouble, and she wants me to help.'

‘“It's too fast.”' Annette stared past me, into some virtual reality of her own. ‘That fits, you know. The bonded labour, the profits from space –
something
is happening too fast. If you look at the news it's like the world's coming apart, and I think it's…being
pulled
apart, by something we don't know about.'

I laughed. ‘If it was, somebody would have told me.'

‘I think somebody just did,' Annette said. ‘Anyway, there's only one way to find out. Go to Kazakhstan. I assume it won't be difficult to find Myra, or she'd have told you how.'

I looked at her, astonished. It was a proposal I was just working around to myself. From Annette I'd have expected, if anything, a fight against it.

‘I don't want you to go,' she said. ‘I don't even know if you do. But I'm more afraid of doing nothing. Nobody's spoken out for you since the troops came in. I don't think they trust you any more.'

‘They?'

‘The space movement people. The comrades.'

‘There's no conspiracy,' I grinned. It was one of my catchphrases.

Annette's eyes were sad and serious.

‘This time, you could be wrong,' she said.

She stood up and moved to the house computer, keying the board in a brisk rattle. ‘Well come on,' she said. ‘Go and help her. I'll try and book you a flight. You get ready, and for heaven's sake remember to pack your gun.'

I complied, shaking my head. None of the thoughts Annette had expressed had ever crossed my mind before. ‘Love never dies'.

Well, fuck me.

 

I was tempted to make the journey by one of the steadily plying airships, but as Annette pointed out those took days, and were usually loaded with freight and crowded with space-workers hung over after a month's leave in Norlonto. So I found myself leaving Stanstead on a regular jet, much larger than the one that Reid and I had taken thirty years earlier. No anti-aircraft fire this time; the Urals corridor had long since been bombed into a safe passage.

Stanstead to Almaty, its airport still shell-pocked from the victory of the Kazakh People's Front; north to Karaganda, a frightening, grimy place, black even in the snow: post-Soviet, post-industrial, post-independence, post-everything. From Karaganda there was a regular hop to Kapitsa; because the ISTWR was still an independent enclave, I was detained for a check – the first in my whole journey. Front cadres and local officials scrutinised my documents, tapped my details into some ancient mainframe (located in India, if the response time was anything to go by) then broke into smiles and offers of Johnny Walker Red Label when my records came up. I had said good things about the KPF, when it wasn't fashionable. They insisted on telling me how much they admired this, and after a few whiskies I told them how much I admired them. They'd fought the US/UN, reunited their country without fueling nationalist fires, and refrained from imposing their state on the one part of the country that didn't want it.

‘The ISTWR?' They thought this was funny. They hadn't refrained out of any high-flown principles.

‘Why not, then?' I shrugged slightly, glanced at the map above the customs-officers' desk. Not the little enclave's defensive capacity, that was for sure.

‘Bad lands,' I was told. ‘Bomb country.'

 

They say the steppe around Kapitsa glows in the dark, but it's just starlight reflected off the snowfields. That's what I told myself on the flight, as I dozed off the effects of good whisky taken neat, jolted awake and smoked and dozed again. Only two other seats on the aircraft were occupied, and their occupants were as keen to keep their own company as I was. I kept my reading-light off, pressed the side of my face to the window, and watched the black thread of the road from Karaganda to Semipalatinsk wend across the steppe, and even fancied I saw the tiny sparks of light from the snow-ploughs.

We landed in a twenty-below dawn on a runway just cleared of snow. A minibus hurried us to the terminal. Beyond the swept-up mounds of dirty snow the gantries stood skeletal and dark. Few aircraft were parked, none were coming in. The airport building was as bright as ever, its workers as secure in their casual employment as before, redundantly supervising busy machines. The republic's heroes still loomed large in their posters.

But compared with its bustle when the place was exporting nuclear deterrence, it might as well have been deserted. Its sinister emptiness recalled the public squares of the old Communist capitals. I set off across the concourse with the nervous hesitation one feels on entering a large, old, and possibly unoccupied house.

I had no idea what to do next. If Myra had wanted to tell me, I'd assumed she would and could; if she'd had any warnings, she'd have included them in the message. As it stood it appeared that the only aspect of our contact which she wanted to keep secret was that she needed my help.

The coffee franchise was still there, and open. It was where she'd met us before. I walked over and ordered a coffee and sat down with it and a copy of the English-language edition of
Kapitsa Pravda
, which lived up to its name in that it gave an apparently truthful account of the news. I had reached the sports pages before I realised that it contained no news whatsoever about Kapitsa.

I scanned the concourse, eagerly fixing on any figure who chanced to resemble my memory of Myra, and sat back disappointed each time. An hour passed. Mutual Protection guards wandered through as if they owned the place. More people came and went. I heard one, then two more aircraft come in. Their passengers straggled individually or in small knots to the glass doors, outside which a dozen taxis idled their engines in the cold.

Maybe I should just look her up in the phone-book…I was standing at the booth and gazing at the search page before I realised that I didn't know her current surname. It even took me several seconds of racking my memory before her original surname came back to me: Godwin. I tried that. No luck.

I put an encrypted call through to Annette.

‘Hi, love. I've arrived safely.'

She smiled. ‘Glad to hear it. That's not why you've called.'

‘Why d'you say that?'

‘I know how your mind works, Jon.' She laughed. ‘It's Davidov. I looked it up on the old insurance policy.'

I suppose I must have looked embarrassed. Annette grinned and stuck out her tongue, a pink millimetre on the tiny screen. ‘I love you,' she said. ‘Take care.'

The screen blinked off. I sighed, suddenly feeling very old and alone, and keyed up the phone-book again.

Davidov, Myra G., Lieut-Cmmdr (ret'd) lived at Flat 36, Block 7, Ignace Reiss Boulevard. No other Davidov was listed at that address; Myra's marriage had broken up years ago. The building, when the taxi dropped me off there, turned out to be a classic Soviet block, recently built in a kind of perverted homage to the workers' motherland but with its concrete already crumbling and discoloured. Only one car was parked outside, a big black Skoda Traverser. Myra's, I guessed: it looked just the sort of vehicle that would be at the disposal of a retired People's Commissar.

The lift, in another neat touch of authenticity, didn't work. I lugged my travel-bag up three flights of stairs. My knees hurt. Time I got a new set of joints. I rang the doorbell and looked around for a CCTV camera. There wasn't one. Instead, a shutter flicked back, exposing a fisheye lens sunk into the door. Bolts squeaked, chains rattled. The door opened slowly. Yellow light, heavy scent, stale cigarette-smoke and loud music escaped. Then a hand reached out and tugged me inside. The door swung and clicked behind me, and I was caught in a warm and bony embrace.

After a minute we stood back, hands on each other's shoulders.

‘Well, hi,' Myra said.

Her steel-grey bobbed hair matched the gunmetal satin of her pyjama-suit. Her face had the waxy, dead-Lenin sheen imparted by post-Soviet rejuvenation technology, a glaring contrast to the mottled and ropy skin of her hands. Like me, like all of the New Old, she was a chimera of youth and age.

‘Hello,' I said. ‘You're looking well.'

She laughed. ‘You aren't.' Her fingertips rasped the stubble on my cheek.

‘Nothing a shower wouldn't fix.'

‘Now that,' she said with a sharp look, ‘is a very good idea.' She reached past me and flipped a switch. Shuddering, firing-up noises came from the walls. ‘Half an hour,' she said, leading me into her living-room. It had one double-glazed window overlooking the street. The view extended past the replicated streets of the district, over the older prefab town and out to the steppe.

A central-heating radiator stood cold beneath the window-sill, an electric heater threw up hot dry air. Insulation was what kept the room warm; it was thickly carpeted, the walls hung with rugs, their patterns – blocky like the pixels of an early computer-game – a display of traditional Afghan designs of helicopter gunships and MiGs and AK-47s. Between them were political and tourist posters of Kazakhstan's history and geography (the ISTWR itself being deficient in both), and old advertisements of rocket blast-offs and nuclear explosions. A television screen, hung among the posters, was tuned, sound off, to a Bolshoi Luna ballet; floating flights and falls, the form's illusions made real under another sky. Huge antique Sony speakers high up on over-loaded bookshelves pounded out Chinese rock.

An old IBM PC stood on the table beside Myra's hand bag and a stack of coding manuals. A glance over their titles suggested that she'd had to encrypt her message by hand. No wonder it was so brief: it must have taken days.

She made me a breakfast, of cereal and yoghurt and bitter Arabic coffee. We chatted about the flight, and about the changes in our lives since we'd last met, several years earlier in an Alexandra Port bar. She still saw her ex-husband, the dashing officer she'd once subverted, and I got the impression that something was still going on between them, but for months he'd been in Almaty, supposedly negotiating with the KPF. She implied that he was being kept out of the way.

‘So is this place still a Trotskyist state?' I asked.

Myra set down her cup, her hand trembling slightly.

‘Oh yes,' she said. ‘It's…just like Russia when Lev Davidovich was in charge.'

That bad? I raised my eyebrows; she nodded.

‘And you're not in the government any more?'

‘Not for some time.' She smiled wryly.

‘I'm sure you still have a lot to say,' I said. ‘Does anyone listen to you?' I cocked my head.

‘They sure do,' she said. ‘I can't complain.'

She looked at her watch. ‘Your shower is ready.'

 

The shower was in a stall off her bedroom. I laid my clothes on the foot of her bed, carefully – I didn't want them creased. As I smoothed out my jacket my fingers brushed the hard edge of my pistol, a neat, flat plastic piece no longer or thicker than my hand. After a moment's thought I took it out and as I got into the shower laid it across the top corner of the stall. Then I turned the shower on and stood in its steamy spray, grateful that this at least was built to spec. I had barely rinsed off my first soaping when the splash-door opened, and Myra stepped in.

‘It's an old trick but it works,' she whispered in my ear, rubbing my back. ‘White noise is white noise, no matter what they use.'

‘You really think you're being bugged?'

She laughed. ‘It's what I would do, in their position.'

‘Who's “they”? What's going on?'

She picked up a tiny disposable razor and an aerosol that extruded pine-scented foam. She lathered my face and began to shave it, thus ensuring the fixity of my gaze. Just as well, because it almost took lip-reading to make out her whispered words in the steady hot rain, and there was no time for her to repeat herself or for me to interrupt.

‘You know there's something going on,' she said. ‘I left that message weeks ago, because I thought if anyone was gonna investigate, it'd be you.' She grinned. ‘And I was right. OK, here's the story. Deep technology – nanotech, genetic engineering, AI and so on – was restricted under the Yanks, and it's still under attack in most places, what with the bloody Greens and religious zealots and shit. Two things happened. One, places like this took in scientific refugees and let them get on with their work under cover of other projects. Two, the US/UN and especially Space Defense kept up their own work. The bans were for everybody else, not for them. Now it's all come together: our scientists are working with theirs, and you can bloody well bet theirs are co-operating – it's the only way they can work off their debts. Same goes for a vast POW labour force. They're shipping stuff into space like there's no tomorrow, and at this rate, there won't be. I think they're going for a coup.'