Another endgame move. Myra nodded slightly and smiled. “Well, that’s it,” she said. “Don’t overwork yourselves, guys. I mean it. Make sure you get in plenty of road-mending, OK?”
The prisoners just grinned at their shared secret She reached for the saddlebags, as though just remembering something. “I’ve brought some books for you.”
The men leaned inward eagerly as she unpacked. They weren’t allowed any kind of interface with the net, and nothing that could be used to build one: no televisions or computers or readers or VR rigs, not even music decks. Nothing could stop Myra carrying in whatever she liked—the saddlebags were legally a diplomatic bag—but any electronic or molecular contraband would have been confiscated the moment she left. So hardbooks it had to be. The prisoners and their families had an unquenchable thirst for them. Myra’s every visit brought more additions to the drift.
This time she had dozens of paperbacks with tasteful Modern Art covers and grey spines, 20th Century Classics—Harold Robbins, Stephen King, Dean Koontz and so on—which she shoved across the table to the men whose names she didn’t know. For her friends Nok-Yung and Se-Ha she’d saved the best for last: hardbooks so ancient that only advanced preservation treatments kept them from crumbling to dust—
Rather like herself, she thought, as the books passed one by one from her gnarled hands: an incredibly rare, possibly unique, copy of Tucker’s edition of Stirner; the Viking Portable Nietzsche; and a battered Thinker’s Library edition of Spencer’s First Principles.
Kim Nok-Yung looked down at them reverently, then up at her. Shin Se-Ha was in some kind of trance. Nok-Yung shook his head.
“This is too much,” he said, almost angrily. “Myra, you can’t—”
“Oh yes, I can.”
“Where did you get them?” asked Se-Ha.
Myra shrugged. “From Reid, funnily enough.”
All the men were looking at her now, with sour smiles.
“From David Reid? The owner?” Kim waved his hand, indicating everything in sight.
“Yeah,” said Myra. “The very same.”
There was a moment of sober silence.
“Well,” Nok-Yung said at last, “I hope we make better use of them than he did, the bastard.”
Everybody laughed, even Myra.
“So do I,” she said.
She settled back in her chair and passed around the Marley pack and accepted the offer of coffee.
“OK, guys,” she said. “The news. Everything’s still going to hell.” She grimaced. “Same as last week. A few shifts in the fronts, that’s all. Take it from me, you ain’t missing much.”
“A few shifts in which fronts?” asked Se-Ha suspiciously.
“Ah,” said Myra. “If you must know—the northeastern front is… active.”
Another silent exchange of glances and smiles. Myra didn’t share in their pleasure, but couldn’t blame them for it. The two encroaching events that filled her most with dread were, for them, each in different ways an earnest of their early liberation.
She said her goodbyes, wondering if it was for the last time, and took her now empty bags and stalked away through the restitution-camp streets, and mounted her horse and rode out of the gate, towards the city.
Thinking about Reid, trying to think calmly and destructively about Reid, she found her mind drifting back. He had not always been such a bastard. He’d been the first person to tell her she need never die. That had been eighty-three years ago, when she was twenty-two years old. She hadn’t believed him…
Death follows me.
“You don’t have to die,” he told her.
Black hair framed his face, black eyebrows his intent, brown-eyed gaze. Dave Reid was dark and handsome but not, alas, tall. He wore a denim jacket with a tin button—a badge, as the Brits called them—pinned to its lapel. The badge was red with the black hammer-and-sickle-and-4 of the International.
“What!” Myra laughed. “I know it feels that way now, everybody our age feels like that, yeah? But it’ll come to us all, man, don’t kid yourself.”
She rolled back on her elbows on the grass and looked up at the blue spring sky. It was too bloody cold for this, but the sun was out and the ground was dry, and that was good enough for sunbathing in Scotland. The grassy slope behind the Boyd Orr Building was covered with groups and couples of students, drinking and smoking and talking. Probably missing lectures—it was already two in the afternoon.
“Seriously,” Dave said, in that Highland accent that carried the sound of wind on grass, of waves on shore, “if you can live into the twenty-first century, you have a damn good chance of living for ever.”
“Says who? L. Ron Hubbard?”
Dave snorted. “Arthur C. Clarke, actually.”
“Who?”
He frowned at her. “You know—scientist, futurist The man who invented the communications satellite.”
“Oh, him,” Myra said scornfully. “Sci-fi. 2001 and all that,” She saw the slight flinch of hurt in David’s face, and went on, “Oh, don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying it’s impossible. Maybe hundreds of years from now, maybe in communism. Not in our lifetimes, though. Tough shit.”
Dave shrugged and rolled another cigarette.
“We’ll see.”
“I guess. And the rate you smoke those things, you’ll be lucky to be alive in the twenty-first century. You won’t even get to first base.”
“Och, I’ll last another twenty-four years.” He sighed, blowing smoke on to the slightly warm breeze, then smiled at her mischievously. “Unless I become a martyr of the revolution, of course.”
“ ‘I have a rendezvous with death, on some disputed barricade’ ” Myra quoted. “Don’t worry. That’s another thing won’t happen in our lifetimes.”
The shadow of the tall building crept over Dave’s face. He shifted deftly, back into the sunlight.
“That’s what you think, is it?”
“Yeah, that’s what I think.” She smiled, and added, with ironic reassurance, “Our natural lifetimes, that is.”
Dave hefted a satchel stuffed with copies of revolutionary newspapers and magazines. “Then what’s the point of all this? Why don’t we just eat, drink and be merry?”
Myra swigged from a can of MacEwan’s, lowered it and looked at him over its rim. “That’s what I am doing right now, lover.”
He took her point, and reached out and stroked the curve of her cheekbone. “But still,” he persisted. “Why bother with politics if you don’t think we’re going to win?”
“Dave,” she said, “I’m not a socialist because I expect to end up running some kinda workers’ state of my own some day. I do what I do because I think it’s right. OK?”
“OK,” said Reid, smiling; but his smile was amused as well as affectionate, as though she were being naive. Irritated without quite knowing why, she turned away.
The city was called Kapitsa, and it was the capital of the International Scientific and Technical Workers’ Republic, which had no other city; indeed, apart from the camps, no other human habitation. The ISTWR was an independent enclave on the fringe of the Polygon—the badlands between Karaganda and Semipalatinsk, a waste-product of Kazakhstan’s nuclear-testing legacy. A long time ago, Kapitsa would have looked modern, with its centre of high-rise office blocks, its inner ring of automatic factories, its periphery of dusty but tree-lined streets and estates of low-rise apartment blocks, the bustling airport just outside and the busy spaceport on the horizon, from which the great ships had loudly climbed, day after day. Now it was a rustbelt, as quaintly obsolete as the Japanese car factories or the Clyde shipyards or the wheat plains of Ukraine.