Divisions (71 page)

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Authors: Ken MacLeod

BOOK: Divisions
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They walked down the streets and across the squares quite unchallenged, though one or two people gave Myra a curious glance, as though recognising her from her television appearance the previous evening. Apart from the parked tanks on the street-corners, around each of which a curious crowd, mainly of children and young people, fraternised with the relaxed-looking crew, the town so far showed little sign of being caught up in a social revolution. It was the weird fighting-machines that were alarming. They stalked and lurched about like Martian invaders; but the locals treated them with casual familiarity, like traffic or street-furniture. Perhaps, Myra thought wryly, it was the absence of searing heat-rays and writhing metal tentacles that did the trick.
As well as those combat drones, big clunky calculating-machines were being installed, indoors in shop-fronts and factories, outdoors in the squares. Gears and teeth and crystal spheres, building to frenetic orreries of some alternate solar system, Copernican with Ptolemaic epicyles. Nanotech dripped and congealed around the brass and steel, like epoxy that never quite set. Around noon Myra and her companions watched one being winched off a flatbed truck and placed carefully in a plaza below a cosmonaut monument.
‘Fucking bizarre,’ said Myra, half to herself, as a Sheenisov cadre clambered on to the plinth and began an explanatory harangue in Uzbek, not one of her languages.
‘With this they will replace the market,’ Nurup scoffed, under his breath. ‘God help us all.’
A lively market in soft drinks and hot food was already forming around the strange device. Nurup and Mustafa bought her Coke and kebabs, and themselves a hotdog each. Both talked quietly to the stall-keepers. Taking the food, they sat down on a bench and ate.
‘There is much discontent,’ Mustafa said eagerly.
‘Bazaar gossip,’ Nurup said. ‘Stall-keepers will tell you anything. They will tell the Sheenisov they love them.’
The two men argued obliquely but intensely for a few minutes about the prospects for terrorist action against the Sheenisov.
‘We’re not here for that,’ Myra reminded them. She shared out cigarettes, then together they walked out of the square. Neither of the men raised any questions about her random following of the streets, until they ended up at the bank of the broad Irtysh river. Flats on the opposite bank, a riverside walk on this. A small pleasure steamer chugged downriver, ferrying a calculatingmachine on its promenade deck.
Myra leaned against a railing, gazing into the river. The two men leaned against the railing, looking the other way. People passed. After a few minutes of this Mustafa asked what was going on.
‘Nothing,’ said Myra, not turning around. ‘Or maybe something. I’m assuming we’ve been followed, or watched. I’m quite prepared to wait here for at least an hour. Make yourselves comfortable.’
But they were too edgy and too alert to be comfortable. The most they did was light another of her Dunhills. Myra slipped her eyeband down and was at once struck by a sense of
déja vu
, as the whole scene around her hazed over, sleeted with grey flecks. After a moment she realised the source of that sense of recognition—it reminded her of how she’d first seen towns like this, back in the 90s: through their Soviet pollution haze. She blinked, moved the eye-band up and down, tried to pick up the nets. Nothing but the grey snow. Even Parvus, summoned from memory, looked frazzled by it.
Sheenisov jamming. Shit.
She’d just given up this experiment when she heard her name called. She turned. Shin Se-Ha and Kim Nok-Yung walked side by side up the pathway, waving to her.
‘It’s all right,’ she told her swiftly tense bodyguards. ‘I know these guys.’
She shook hands, smiling, with the Korean and the Japanese; introduced them to the Kazakhstanis. Discreet compliments on her rejuvenated appearance were exchanged with her admiration for their now healthier physiques. Even their relatively humane imprisonment had marked them, weighing them down with something which their new freedom—if freedom it was—had enabled them to shrug off. They walked taller. They confronted the Kazakhstani
emigrés
unabashed.
‘So, you are
Sheenisov
,’ said Mustafa, in a disgusted tone.
‘Lay off,’ said Myra. ‘They’re OK. We have to talk.’
‘Yes,’ said Nok-Yung. ‘We have to talk.’
It was a mild day, for the time of year. Not shirt-sleeve weather, but comfortable if you dressed warm, as they all had. Myra indicated a semi-circle of
benches in a concreted picnic area along the bank a little. The two exprisoners shrugged, then nodded.
Nok-Yung and Se-Ha sat on either side of her, the two bodyguards on separate benches a few metres away. Children, snug-wrapped in quilted satin bomber-jackets and padded trousers, capered about and yelled, oblivious to the adults.
‘So how are you getting on, in this brave new world?’ Myra asked.
‘We’re fine,’ said Nok-Yung, his comrade nodding emphatically. ‘Our families are joining us soon, and in the meantime we have much to do.’
‘You both got jobs?’ Myra smiled.
‘There are no
jobs
,’ Se-Ha said primly. ‘There is work. We have been … co-opted, and we have been sent to talk to you.’
‘Well, I had guessed this was hardly a coincidence,’ Myra said. ‘But I had not expected to see you as Sheenisov cadre already.’
‘It’s an open system,’ Nok-Yung said. ‘Interesting contributions are quickly taken up; amplified; discussed.’
‘The opposite of the nets, then,’ Myra said. They laughed.
‘And the opposite of the Leninist system,’ Nok-Yung said earnestly. ‘Once you are in, you are
in
, there is no … apprenticeship? No candidacy, no working your way up. Past experience,’ he added rather smugly, ‘c
ounts.’
Myra flashed her eyebrows. No doubt the militant and the Marxist mathematician had found their niches quickly. ‘I’m sure that’s all fascinating, ’ she said. ‘But I’m here to put a diplomatic proposal to the Sino-Soviet Union as a whole. Can I do that, just by talking to you?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very well.’ She put it to them, straight: the deal, the crossing corridors. Let the revolutionary horde flow around Kazakhstan, like a flood around a rock, and they could swamp the rest of the world, for all she cared. (Could and would run into the sand, she did not say, but that was what she expected.)
They listened politely, now and then asking for clarification, making notes and doodling maps on hand-held slates that—while obviously information-retrieval devices—looked as though they were made of … slate. Se-Ha stood up.
‘I must consult,’ he said, nodded, and walked briskly away. Nok-Yung accepted a cigarette, and leaned back luxuriantly, sprawling out with his elbows on the back of the bench. He regarded Myra through narrow eyes and curling smoke.
‘Why do you resist the SSU, Myra?’ he asked mildly. ‘It is only democracy. It is only socialism. A means—and an end, compatible at last, after all the disasters and crimes done in the name of both.’ He spread his hands. ‘There are no secrets here, no deceptions. When you were as young as you
look—’ he smiled ‘—you would have thought this revolution, this liberation more wonderful than your wildest dreams.’
‘Don’t let my
mujahedin
friends hear you say that!’ she warned, half in jest. She glanced over at Nurup Kerbayev. He smiled back, eyes and teeth flashing like knives.
‘But you’re right,’ she went on. ‘Let’s just say … I may look young again, but I’ve had a long, long life in the meantime. I’ve come to believe in myself, and in … my country, Kazakhstan. And I will not be assimilated, and nor will we.’ She waved a hand around. ‘These people, they may seem … happy enough to wait and see. But deep down, no—just below the surface—they are seething with suspicion. They are not your Mongolians or Siberians, who God knows had it bad enough under Stalinism but who found everything since was worse. To the Kazakhs socialism means “the tragedy” of the 1930s: the forced settlement, the famine. It means the nuclear tests, the cancers, the birth defects. They don’t want to be the subjects of any more experiments. And if you want to point to the ISTWR as a counter-example—that was a special case. A self-selected minuscule minority. Our socialism was always a joke, more black humour than Red. Trotskyism in one country—what a laugh!’
What a laugh she gave. She frightened herself. One of the scampering children playing around them stopped, put his thumb in his mouth and ran away.
‘We ran a benign state capitalism, nothing more,’ she went on. ‘In your case, my friend, it was not even that. God, I feel disgusted with myself that we did it, that we ever allowed ourselves to be compradors for Reid’s goddamn private gulags.’
Nok-Yung stared at the sky for a moment. ‘I don’t know what to say, Myra,’ he said at last. ‘Your regret over the Mutual Protection camps is … well taken. But about the other matters—you must surely know that none of what you have been talking about, the USSR and so on, is socialism as we understand it, and as you understood it. So stop confusing the issue.’
‘Oh, I’m well aware that you are different. That you may well be the genuine article: Marx and Engels, Proprietors. And you know what? I don’t care. I don’t want it, for myself or for anyone.’
‘Why not?’ Nok-Yung sounded more puzzled than offended.
Myra pointed across the river to the insectile shape of a fighting-machine, patrolling the water’s edge with heron-like steps.
‘Because of those damn things,’ she said. ‘And the calculating-machines.’
‘What!’ Nok-Yung’s eyes creased up in amusement. ‘Luddism is not your true ideology, Myra. I cannot believe this. These machines are one of the most marvellous achievements of the Sheenisov—a whole alternative nanotechnology, worked out quite independently of the West. You know
how the machines scale down, all the way to the molecular scale, and are all mechanical and chemical and optical, with no need for electronic interfaces? That’s their—our—secret weapon, an open secret. A computer system that the enemy cannot penetrate, but that everyone can understand and access. I’ve just begun to use it, and I tell you, it has the most intuitive interface I’ve ever come across. The capitalists would kill for it. Or rather, they would kill to be able to monopolise it. But it’s free, so they can’t.’
‘I know about your strange machines,’ Myra said. ‘The CIA told me all about them.’ She tapped her temple, smiling ironically. ‘“I have detailed files.”’
Nok-Yung caught the allusion. ‘It is not
The Terminator
, you know! Not—what was it in the films?—Skynet. It is not … inimical.’
‘Not now, perhaps. But what will it do, when it—or you—have covered the world, like a banyan tree?’
Nok-Yung spat a puff of air and smoke. ‘More Luddism! The machines will form a benign human environment, a second nature, within which human nature can flourish, truly, for the first time.’ He leaned forward, speaking confidentially. ‘Let me tell you what we have done, something that no other system would have dared to do. We have nanofactured a virally distributed, genetically fixable version of the anti-ageing treatment. It spreads before our migrations like a benign plague. You may be already infected, yourself. A gift.’
‘God, that is
so
irresponsible!’ Myra jolted rigid. ‘Viruses
mutate
, dammit, in case you hadn’t heard!’
Nok-Yung made a planing motion with his hand. ‘Not this one. It has self-repair built in. It has tested stable through a million virtual generations. ’
‘
Virtual
generations, yes! Man, you did enough design work in the camp to know what
that’s
worth in the real world!’
‘Different system, different design philosophy,’ he said, with infuriating complacency. ‘Our testing kits are themselves
part
of the real world. It’s like the difference between a working scale model and a simulation. There is simply no comparison. And the computing resources are vast, vaster even than anything the spacers have yet built.’
Myra felt her gaze sinking into the bottomless pool of his self-confidence. It was truly terrifying; it was, she realised, what she most feared for herself—to be so sure. To be absolutely certain that she was right would, as far as she was concerned, be the end of her. Doubt was her only hope, her comfort and companion since childhood, her scepticism her sole security.
Shin Se-Ha returned and sat down, affecting not to notice their frozen moment of mutual incomprehension. He looked at Myra, gravely, and shook his head.
‘No deal, I’m afraid.’
Myra could scarcely believe it.
‘Why ever not? The alternative is to fight your way through Kazakhstan! All you have to do instead is not fight us! What more can you ask of us?’
Se-Ha shook his head sadly. ‘It is not that, Myra,’ he said. ‘It is not aggression, or animosity. It is simply the imperative of our mode of production. It will be global or it will be nothing, as your Trotsky always said. We have to keep running, or fall over, until we meet ourselves, on the other side of the world.’
He saw this wasn’t getting anywhere with her. ‘More concretely,’ he continued, ‘we can’t have … unassimilated areas within the Union. It would be too much of an opportunity for our enemies. And we can’t stop for long, because that would force us to engage in internal class struggle, particularly with the small-property owners, which we do not want.’ He smiled. ‘To put it mildly! We have so far been able to avoid the whole dictatorship of the proletariat scenario by simply carrying the remaining small and large businesses along with us. The machine-based common-property economy expands, and they expand in its interstices. They can live like nits in our hair, as long as we are running. If we stopped, the itch would be intolerable. We would have to …
scratch.’

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