Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

the
Fourth International.
    And they really were young, not rejuvenated old folks like
her; she could hardly understand it, because she’d been
thinking of the International, fordecades now, as a club of
ageing veterans. But then she thought of how the most formative
and exciting experience of their childhoods had been a revolution
– the British section of the Fall Revolution, yes! –
and how that might have given them an idea of what the real (that
is to say, ideal, never-actually-existing) Revolution might be
like.
    They’d regarded her, of course, as an old comrade, a
veteran revolutionary who’d actually made a revolution, and
actually ran a workers’ state; but they’d soon lost
their reserve, perhaps unconsciously misled (she fancied) by her
increasingly believable apparent youth; and told her in more
detail than she needed to know of the inevitable rancorous
rivalries that had pitted them against, and the rest of the local
Left for, her regime’s liberal critics and/or Sino-Soviet
communist foes.
    She was grateful for their support, of course, and told them
so; but she thought their ingrained acceptance of far-left
factionalism was blinding them to the depth of genuine hatred and
moral outrage she’d aroused, and indeed to its
justification. There had been nothing in the angry man’s
diatribe which she hadn’t at one time or another said to
herself.
    You fucking sell-out, you fucking capitalist whore. Yes, comrade, you have a point there. There may be something in
what you say.
    At the same time she found that the comrades were
over-solucitious, certain that she’d be in danger if she
wandered around on her own in Glasgow. They urged her to contact
the consulate, and to travel officially. Myra had demurred,
pointing out that that was exactly what had got her into this
trouble in the first place. She hadn’t told them what she
did intend to do, however – somebody must have
leaked the news of her unheralded and early arrival,and she had
no reason to suppose it might not be one of them.
    She passed the old church, St Jude’s, which still looked
much too grand, too catholic for the tiny denomination it
served, and opposite it the Halt Bar where she’d drunk with
David Reid and with Jon Wilde, separately and together, during
and after the brief, intense affairs that had nudged all their
lives on to their particular paths.
    And thus, the lives and deaths of countless others. Jon had
virtually started the space movement, and founded Space
Merchants. Reid had built up Mutual Protection, and Myra the
ISTWR. All from small beginnings, inconsequential at the time,
all eventually affecting history on a scale usually attributed to
Great Men.
    Perhaps if they had not, there would have been some other
Corsican… but no. Chaos reigned, here as elsewhere.
    At the green bridge over the Kelvin she paused, gazing down at
the brown spate and white swirl. How trivial were the causes of
the courses of any particle, any bubble on that flow. No, it was
wilder than that, because the water was at least confined by its
banks: it was more like how the whole course of a river could be
deflected by a pebble, by a grain of sand, a blade of grass, at
its first upwelling; where the great forces of gravity and
erosion and all the rest did minute but momentous battle with the
surface tension of a particular drop. History was a river where
every drop was a potential new source, a foun-tainhead of future
Amazons.
    She walked on, past the salient of Kelvingrove Park on the
left and up the steepening slope of Gibson Street, and turned to
the right along the still tree-shaded avenue to the Institute.
She rang thebell, smiling wryly at the polished brass of the
name-plate. Once the Institute of Soviet and East European
Studies, then of Russian and East European Studies,
then…
    The Institute for the Study of Post-Civilised Societies, was
what they called it now.
     
    The woman who opened the door looked very East European, in
her size (small) and expression (suspicious). Her dark eyes
widened slightly.
    ‘Oh, it’s you,’ she said.
‘Godwin.’
    Tes, hello.’ Myra stuck out her hand. The woman shook
it, with brief reluctance, tugging Myra inside and closing the
door at the same time.
    ‘This place is watched,’ she said. She had black
bobbed hair; her age was hard to make out. Her clothes were as
shabby as Myra’s: blue denim smock, black jeans grey at the