Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

men.’
    ‘They’re on a break, Citizen,’ he said,
squinting up at her. ‘So it’s up to them,
right?’
    ‘ Right,’ said Myra. Physical work counted as
recreation. It was the intellectual labour of design and
monitoring that taxed the convicts’ nerves.
    She turned to the men, who waved to her and shouted greetings
and explanations: she’d have to wait the few minutes it
would take for them to finish spreading and rolling some freshly
poured tarmac. Not offering one to the guard, she lit a Marley
and let the men take their time finishing their break.
She’d always insisted that her arrivals and inspections
counted as work-time for the labourers.
    Her spirits lifted as the Virginia and the Morocco kicked in.
The labourers had their yellow suits rolled down to the waist,
and were sweating even though the temperature had just climbed
above freezing. Most of them were younger – let’s
face it, far younger – than herself; dark-tanned
Koreans and Japanese, muscular as martial arts adepts –
which, indeed, some of them were. She enjoyed watching them, the
effect of smoke amplifying the underlying undertone of lust, the
happy, hippy hormonal hum…
    But that reminded her of Georgi, and her mood crashed again.
Georgi was dead. Sometimes it seemed every man she’d ever
fucked was dead; it was like she carried a disease: Niall
MacCallum had died in a car crash, Jaime Gonzalez had died
– what? – seventy years ago in the contra war,
Jon Wilde had died in her arms on the side of the Karaganda road
(on snow that turned red as his face turned white), and now
Georgi Davidov had died in the consulate at Almaty, of a heart
attack. (They expected her to believe thai?)
    There had been others, she reminded herself. Quite recent
others. It wasn’t every man she’d ever fucked who was
doomed, it was every man she’dever loved. There was
only one exception she knew of. All her men were dead, except
one, and he was a killer.
    Even, perhaps, Georgi’s killer. Fucking heart attack,
my ass! It was one of their moves, it had to be – a
move in the endgame.
    A door banged open somewhere and the street suddenly swarmed
with children pelting along and yelling, their languages and
accents as varied as the colours of their skins. Few of the
camp’s bonded labour-force were women, but many of the men
had women with them; there was every inducement for the prisoners
to bring their families along. It was humane, but politic as
well: a man with a woman and children was unlikely to risk escape
or revolt.
    Surrounded by children calling to their fathers, poking
fingers in the hot asphalt, crowding around the machines and
loudly investigating, die gang knocked off at last, leaving the
guard to mind the newly tarred road. Myra savoured his
disgruntled look as she crushed the filter roach under her heel
and stepped out into the centre of the untarred part of the
street.
    ‘Hi, guys.’
    They all knew who she was, but the only ones among them she
recognised were two members of the camp committee, Kim Nok-Yung
and Shin Se-Ha. The former was a young Korean shipyard worker,
stocky and tough; the latter a Japanese mathematician of slender
build and watchful mien. Kim seized her hand, grinning
broadly.
    ‘Hello, Myra.’
    ‘Good to see you, Nok-Yung. And you, Se-Ha.’
    The Japanese man inclined his head. ‘Hi.’ He
insisted on taking her saddlebags. The whole gang surrounded her,
flashing eyes and teeth, talking toeach other and to her without
much regard for mutual comprehension. They shooed away the
children and led her into the nearest hut. Its doorway film
brushed over her, burst in a shower of droplets with an odour of
antiseptic, and reformed behind her. She blinked rapidly and
shrugged out of her heavy coat, throwing it on to one of a row of
hooks that grew from the curving wall.
    Her first deep breath was evidence enough of how effective the
filter film was at keeping out the dust. At the same time, it
brought a flush to her skin as her immune system rushed to
investigate whatever she’d just inhaled of the nanoware
endemic to the building’s interior. She followed Kim into
the dining-area, an airy space of flat-surfaced furnishings
– some a warning red to indicate that they were for
heating, others white for eating off. The chairs were padded
black polycarbon plastic. Around the walls, racked on shelves or
stacked on floors, were thousands of books: