Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

against the
Sheenisov. You might even get it. What I want to tell you is two
things. One, don’t do it. It won’t do you any good.
You can’t fight communism with imperialism. It’s just
throwing napalm on the fire.’
    Myra favoured him with a look that said she’d heard this
before. ‘If you say so. And what else doyou have to tell
me? Try and make it something that’s news to me, how about
that?’
    ‘You’re in worse trouble than you think,’
Jordan said. ‘The entity you call the General is working
for the Sheenisov.’
    Myra almost choked on her sip of brandy. She coughed fire for
a moment. She felt totally disoriented.
    ‘What? And how the hell would you
know?’
    ‘Strictly speaking,’Jordan Brown said, ‘the
Sheenisov are working for it. As to how I know.’
    He held out a hand towards Cat. She leaned forward as Jordan
leaned back.
    ‘Myra,’ she said earnesdy, ‘I may be a
barbarian now, but I used to be like you. I used to be in the
International.’
    ‘Oh, Jesus!’ Myra exploded. ‘Half the
fucking world is run by ex-Trots! Tell me something I don’t
know, like how you heard about the FI mil org -the
General.’
    ‘I was coming to that,’ Gat said, mildly enough
-but Myra could read the younger woman’s face like a
computer screen, and she could see the momentary spasm of
impatient rage. This barbarian lady was someone who’d got
dangerously used to not being interrupted. Cat forced a smile. T
still hear rumours.’
    ‘Rumours? That’s what you’re relying
on?’
    ‘It seems you’ve just confirmed one,’ Jordan
said, dryly.
    Myra acknowledged that she had. But it seemed a situation
where stonewalling would be less productive than admitting that
the General existed, and trying to find out where the rumour came
from. Par-vus hadn’t spotted anything like that…
    ‘Did you pick this up off the net, or what?’
    Jordan looked at Fix and Cat, and all three of them laughed.
To Myra, it sounded like a mocking laugh.
    ‘God, you people,’ Jordan said. His tone changed
as he went on, becoming an invocation, or an imprecation.
‘You have a screen between you and the world all the time.
We have the human world, and the natural world. We have the whole
world that you call marginal, the scattered society of free
humanity. We have the whisper in the market, the gesture on the
road, the chalked mark on the pavement. The twist of a leaf, the
turning of a twig. We have the smell carried on the wind. We have
the night sky and the names of all its fixed and moving and
falling stars. We have our friends in all your cities and camps
and armies. We have the crystal radio that receives and the
spark-gap that transmits, in codes you have forgotten, on
wavelengths you no longer monitor, in languages that you
disdained to learn.’
    He tipped his head back and began glossolaliat-ing in Morse
code, da-da-dit-di-da-dididididah … Cat and Fix
cocked their heads, listening, and after a minute grinned and
guffawed.
    Jordan looked a little smug at this demonstration. ‘See,
I can joke in tongues. We have our own Internet, and our own
International. Don’t bother looking for a leak from
yours.’
    ‘Besides,’ said Fix, speaking up for the first
time, ‘we know this thing from way back. Jordan and Cat
fought in the revo, and so did it. It was called the Black Plan,
and it was used by – or it used – the Army of the New
Republic. We’ve all encountered it, and we know where it
went. To New View, your commie-cult commune in space.’
    ‘And we know how it thinks,’ said Cat. ‘We
can see its hand in what the Sheenisov are doing, intheir tactics
and in their strategy. It’s not exactly malevolent, but it
is… ambitious.’
    ‘So?’ Myra shrugged, trying hard to stay cool, and
to reassert her control over the conversation. ‘We -that
is, my country, Kazakhstan -’ there, she had said it, and
the words my country, Kazakhstan could not be unsaid
‘ – we are not relying on this thing. We take no
orders from it, not since – well, it got on the wrong side
of me, put it that way. I don’t say I believe you about its
taking the side of the Sheen-isov, but – let’s say I
wouldn’t put that past it. If you’re so worried about
it, why do you object to my getting help to stop it?’
    ‘Because,’ said Jordan, emphasising each word with
a chop of the hand, lit can not be stopped. Not by
fighting it. If it finds itself