Myra, however, felt somewhat cheered as the mare took her through the light traffic of the noonday streets. The apple trees were in bloom, and every wall had its fresh-looking, colourful mural of flowers or stars or ships or crowds or children or heroes or heroines. Real ancient space-age stuff, an effect enhanced by the younger—genuinely young—people enjoying the chilly sunshine in the fashionable scanty garb, which recalled the late 1960s in its jaunty futurism. She looked at girls in skinny tights and shiny, garish minidresses and found herself wondering if they were cold… probably not, the clothes were only an imitation of their nylon or PVC originals, the nanofactured fabrics veined with heat-exchangers, laced with molecular machines.
The bright clothing gave the people on the street an appearance of prosperity, but Myra was all too aware that it was superficial. The clothes were cheaper than paper, easily affordable even on Social Security. Over the past few years, with the coming of the diamond ships, the heavy-booster market had gone into free fall, and unemployment had rocketed. The dole was paid by her department out of the rent from Mutual Protection, and it couldn’t last. Nostalgia tourism—the old spaceport was now a World Heritage Site, for what that was worth—looked like the only promising source of employment.
Before she knew it, the horse had stopped, from habit, outside the modest ten-storey concrete office-block of the republic’s government on Revolution Square. Myra sat still for a moment, gazing wryly at this week’s morale-boosting poster on the official billboard: a big black-and-white blow-up of the classic Tass photo of Gagarin, grinning out from his cosmonaut helmet. She remembered the time, in her grade-school classroom on the Lower East Side, when she’d first seen this human face and had formed some synaptic connection between Gagarin’s grin and Guevara’s glare.
Space and socialism. What a swindle it had all been. She shook the reins, took the mare at a slow pace around to the back, stabled it, wiped the muck from her boots and ascended the stairs. The corridors to her office—at the front of the building, as befitted a People’s Commissar for Social Policy and Prime Minister Pro Tern and (now that she came to think about it) Acting President—were filled with a susurrus of hurrying feet and fast-fading whispers. Myra glanced sharply at the groups she passed, but few seemed willing to return her look.
She closed the door of her office with a futile but soul-satisfying slam. Let the apparatchiks worry about her mood, if she had to worry about theirs. The last time she’d sniffed this evasive air in the corridors had been just before the first—and only—time she’d fallen out of power, back in 2046. Then, she’d suspected an imminent move from the Mutual Protection company and its proteges within the state apparatus: a coup d’etat Now, she suspected that Mutual Protection and its allies were into the final moves of a much wider game-plan, as wide as it could be: a coup du monde. Or coup d’etoile! She stalked to the window, shedding her coat and hat and gloves in quick, violent movements, leaned on her knuckles on the sill and scanned her surroundings in a spasm of fang-baring territoriality. No tanks or tramping feet sounded in her city’s streets, no black helicopters clattered in her country’s sky. What did she expect? There were days at least to go before anything happened—and, when it did, the opening blows would be overt in larger capitals than hers; she’d be nipped by CNN soundbites in the new order’s first seconds.
She sighed and turned away, picked up her dropped clothes and hung them carefully on the appropriate branches of a chrome-plated rack. The office was as self-consciously retro-modernist as the styles on the street, if a little more sophisticated—pine walls and floor, lobate leather layers at random on both; ornaments in steel and silver, ebony and plastic, of planetary globes and interplanetary craft. She dropped into the office chair and leaned back, letting it massage her shoulders and neck. She slid the band across her eyes, summoned a head-up display and rolled her eyes to study it. The anti-viral ’ware playing across her retinae flickered, but there was nothing untoward for it to report; here, as in all the offices, the walls had teeth. Her own software was wrapped around her, its loyalty as intimate, and as hard to subvert, as the enhanced immune-systems in her blood. It was personal, it was a personal, a unique configuration of software agents that scanned the world and Myra’s responses to the world, and built up from that interaction a shrewd assessment of her needs and interests. It looked out information for her, and it looked after her investments. It did to the world nets what her Sterling search engine did for her Library—it selected and extracted what was relevant from the vast and choppy sea of data in which most people swam or, more often, drowned.
Having a good suite of personal ’ware was slighdy more important for a modern politician than the traditional personal networks of influence and intelligence. In the decade since she’d recovered power, Myra had made sure that her networks—both kinds, virtual and actual—were strong and intertwined, strong enough to carry her if the structure of the state ever again let her down. Though even that was unlikely—her purges, though bloodless, had been as ruthless as Tito’s. No official of the ISTWR would ever again have the slightest misapprehension of where their best interests lay, and no employee or agent of Mutual Protection would fancy their chances of changing that.
She’d have to consult with the rest of Sovnarkom soon enough—a meeting was scheduled for 3 p.m.—and round up some of the scurrying underlings from the corridors to prepare for it, but she wanted to get her own snapshot of the situation first.
Myra’s personal didn’t have a personality, as far as she knew, but it had a persona: a revolutionary, a stock-market speculator, an arms dealer, a spy; a freewheeling, high-rolling, all-swindling communist-capitalist conspirator out of some Nazi nightmare. It had a name.
Tarvus,” she whispered. The retinal projectors on her eyeband summoned an image of a big man in a baggy suit and a shirt stretched across his belly like a filled sail, scudding along on gales of information. He strolled towards her, smiling, his pockets stuffed with papers, his cigarette hand waving as he prepared to tell her something. She’d never come across a recording of the original Parvus in action, but she’d given this one the appearance of one historic Trotskyist leader, and the mad-scientist mannerisms of another, whose standard speech she’d once sat through, long ago in the Student Union in Glasgow.
“Give me the big picture.”
Parvus nodded. He ran his fingers through his mop of white hair, furrowed his brow, grinned maniacally.
“Jane’s, I think.” He flicked an inch of ash, conjured a screen. Her gaze fixed on an option; she blinked, and the room vanished from her sight; again, and Earth fell away.
Her first virtual view, spun in orbit, was from Jane’s Market Forces—a publicly available, but prohibitively expensive, real-time survey of military deployments around the world. She was running the next-but-one release, currently in beta test. It had cost the republic’s frugal defence budget nothing more than the stipend to place a patriotic Kazakh postgrad in the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute’s equally cash-starved IT department. (That, and an untraceable credit line to his comms account.) Myra, long familiar with the conventional symbols and ideographs, took it all in at an abstract leveclass="underline" colour-coded, vectored graphs in a 3-D space, with other dimensions implied by subtle shadings and the timing of pulsations. That photic filigree hung like a complicated cloud-system over the relatively static histograms depicting the hardware and the warm bodies. The physical locations and quantities of personnel and materiel could provide only a basement-level understanding of the world military balance, just as the location of physical plant was only a rough cut of the state of the world market. Second by second, market and military forces shifted unpredictably, their mutual interpenetration more complex than any ideology had ever foreseen. With most of the world’s official armies revolutionary or mercenary or both, and most of the conflicts settled in unarguable simulation before they started, everyone from the bankers down through the generals to the grunts on the ground would shrug and accept the virtual verdict, and change sides, reinforce or retreat in step with their software shadows—all except the Greens, and the Reds. They fought for real, and played for keeps.