Valentina Kozlova came in, her military fatigues elegant as always, her hair untidy, her hands full of hardcopy. She was in her fifties, a still-young child of the century, young enough and lucky enough to have got the anti-ageing treatments before she got old. She smiled tensely and sat down. Then Andrei Mukhartov, cropped-blond, fortyish and looking it—probably by intent—soberly conventional in a three-piece suit of electric-blue raw silk. Denis Gubanov, younger than the others, ostentatiously casual, needing a shave, looking as though he’d just come in from sounding out an informer in some sleazy spaceport bar. Alexander Sherman arrived last, giving his usual impression of having been pulled away from more urgent business. His fashionable pseudo-plastic jump-suit was doubtless just the job for his post, but Myra liked it even less than she liked him. He sat down and glanced around as though expecting the meeting to begin immediately, then pursed his lips and slid two sheets of paper across to Myra.
“More resignations, I’m afraid,” he said. “Tatyana and Michael have…”
Taken off for richer pastures,” Myra said. “I heard.” She looked at the empty spaces around the depleted table, and shrugged. “Well, according to revolutionary convention there is no such thing as an inquorate meeting, so…”
“We really must co-opt some new members!” Sherman said.
“Yes,” said Myra drily. “We really must.”
Her tone made Alexander snap back, “It’s a disgrace—we have no Commissar for Law, or the Interior, or—”
“Yes, yes,” Myra interrupted. “And half the fucking members of the Supreme Soviet have fucked off—the wrong half, as it happens, “couldn’t find a competent commissar for anything among the remainder. At the rate we’re going, we won’t have enough of an electorate to make up the numbers! So what do you suggest?”
Alexander Sherman opened his mouth, closed it, and shrugged. His mutinous look convinced Myra that he’d be the next to go—as Commissar for Industry, he had the right connections already.
“OK, comrades,” Myra said, “let’s call the meeting to order.” She took off her eyeband and laid it formally on the table, and those who hadn’t already done so followed suit. It was not quite a rule to do so, but it was the custom—a gesture of politeness as well as an assurance that everyone was paying attention—to set aside one’s personal for the duration of the meeting. Myra could never make up her mind whether it was mutual trust, or mutual suspicion, that lay behind the custom of not doing the same with one’s personal weapons. Nobody’d ever pulled a gun at a Sovnarkom meeting, but there were precedents…
“Recorder: on. Regular meeting of the Council, Friday 9 May 2059, Myra Godwin-Davidova presiding, five members present.” She looked around, then looked back at the recorder’s steel grille. “I move that we shelve the agenda and go straight to emergency session. Starting with the death of Citizen Davidov.”
No dissent. Seconds of silence passed.
“Don’t all talk at once,” she said.
Valentina Kozlova (Defence) spoke first. “Look, Myra—Comrade Chair—we’ve all spoken to you about Georgi’s death. We were all very sorry to hear of it.”
Myra nodded. “Thank you.”
“Having said that—we need to decide on our political response. Now, obviously the police in Almaty are investigating, and so far there seem to be no indications of foul play.” She shrugged. “That, of course, is hard to prove, these days. However… Georgi Yefrimovich had a great deal of responsibility—” she gestured vaguely at Andrei Mukhartov, the International Affairs Commissar “—and in the circumstances, natural causes do seem likely.”
Myra sighed. “Yes, I appreciate that. And I appreciate what all of you have said to me. Let me say for the record that personally I don’t accept that Georgi’s death was anything but an assassination.”
She faced down the resulting commotion.
“However,” she continued, “I don’t ask or expect any of you to take this as more than a suspicion. At the moment, even the question of who might benefit from it is very unclear—if Georgi was murdered, it might have been by one side or the other. Possibly some elements in the space movement saw him as an obstacle to their… diplomacy. Possibly some forces opposed to the space movement thought we’d think exactly that, and had him killed as a provocation. Or maybe, just maybe, his heart gave out. Whatever—it’s come at a bad time for us.”
Mukhartov grunted agreement.
After a moment of gloomy silence Valentina spoke again. “We’ve all studied your message,” she said. “What’s your own suggested course of action?”
“We try to stop them, of course. Damned if I want the fucking UN back on top of us, let alone one controlled by the goddam space movement and its proxies.”
Valentina leaned forward. “For my part,” she said, “I agree with your assessment. We have to be ready for the new situation in which the space movement controls the ReUN, and with it the Earth Defense battlesats. But—” she hesitated a moment, sighed almost imperceptibly, and continued “—I think that the death of Georgi, the understandable suspicions this has aroused, and the, ah, unexpected and unauthorised increase in labour-camp output may have given your response a… subjective element.” Kozlova glanced around the table. “The coming shift in the balance of power can’t be stopped by us, or by anybody. The most we’ve been able to do—thanks to Georgi’s diplomacy—has been to help keep Kazakhstan neutral, with a tilt against the takeover. Even they wouldn’t take direct action against it, though God knows Georgi tried to persuade them to. They assured us they just didn’t have the clout, and I believe them. Now you seem to be suggesting that we throw our weight, such as it is, against it. My own view is that we’d accomplish more by staying neutral. It could work to our advantage—if we accommodate ourselves to new realities in good time.”
Myra unfroze her face. “Get in on the winning side, you mean?” she suggested lightly.
Yes, exactly,” Kozlova said. She seemed encouraged by Myra’s response, or lack of response. “After all,” she ploughed on, “we ourselves are in a way part of the space movement, we go back a long way with it, and the Sheenisov are as much a threat to us as the barbarians and reactionary governments are to some other enclaves. Frankly, I think we should put out some diplomatic feelers to the other side before the crunch, which as you correctly point out is a matter of days or weeks away. And we’re not exactly in a position of strength at the moment. So there is indeed a certain urgency to our decision.”
“Interesting,” Myra murmured. “Anyone else?”
Denis Gubanov (Internal Security) broke in sharply. “The Chair spoke in her message of states being suborned and subverted. I don’t think we should let ourselves become one of them! Whatever the rhetoric, and the propaganda of inevitability, it’s obvious what’s going on. Imperialism took a severe blow with the fall of the Yanks, but the blow wasn’t fatal, worse luck. Monopoly capital always finds new political instruments, and the space movement, so-called, has proved an admirable vehicle.” He snorted, briefly. “Literally—a launch vehicle! Through it, the rich desert the Earth. Why should we help them on their way?”