Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

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 aroundthe 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
waynow, 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