Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

disputed
barricade,“ Myra quoted. ‘Don’t worry.
That’s another thing won’t happen in our
lifetimes.’
    The shadow of the tall building crept over Dave’s face.
He shifted deftly, back into the sunlight.
    ‘That’s what you think, is it?’
    ‘Yeah, that’s what I think.’ She smiled, and
added, with ironic reassurance, ‘Our natural lifetimes, that is.’
    Dave hefted a satchel stuffed with copies of revolutionary
newspapers and magazines. ‘Then what’s the point of
all this? Why don’t we just eat, drink and be
merry?’
    Myra swigged from a can of MacEwan’s, lowered it and
looked at him over its rim. ‘That’s what I am doing right now, lover.’
    He took her point, and reached out and stroked the curve of
her cheekbone. ‘But still,’ he persisted. ‘Why
bother with politics if you don’t think we’re going
to win?’
    ‘Dave,’ she said, ‘I’m not a socialist
because I expect to end up running some kinda workers’
state of my own some day. I do what I do because I think
it’s right. OK?’
    ‘OK,’ said Reid, smiling; but his smile was amused
as well as affectionate, as though she were being naive.
Irritated without quite knowing why, she turned away.
    The city was called Kapitsa, and it was the capital of the
International Scientific and Technical Workers’ Republic,
which had no other city; indeed, apart from the camps, no other
human habitation. The ISTWR was an independent enclave on the
fringe of the Polygon – the badlands between Karaganda and
Semipalatinsk, a waste-product of
Kazakhstan’snuclear-testing legacy. A long time ago,
Kapitsa would have looked modern, with its centre of high-rise
office blocks, its inner ring of automatic factories, its
periphery of dusty but tree-lined streets and estates of low-rise
apartment blocks, the bustling airport just outside and the busy
spaceport on the horizon, from which the great ships had loudly
climbed, day after day. Now it was a rustbelt, as quaintly
obsolete as the Japanese car factories or the Clyde shipyards or
the wheat plains of Ukraine.
    Myra, however, felt somewhat cheered as the mare took her
through the light traffic of the noonday streets. The apple trees
were in bloom, and every wall had its fresh-looking, colourful
mural of flowers or stars or ships or crowds or children or
heroes or heroines. Real ancient space-age stuff, an effect
enhanced by the younger – genuinely young – people
enjoying the chilly sunshine in the fashionable scanty garb,
which recalled the late 1960s in its jaunty futurism. She looked
at girls in skinny tights and shiny, garish minidresses and found
herself wondering if they were cold… probably not, the
clothes were only an imitation of their nylon or PVC originals,
the nanofactured fabrics veined with heat-exchangers, laced with
molecular machines.
    The bright clothing gave the people on the street an
appearance of prosperity, but Myra was all too aware that it was
superficial. The clothes were cheaper than paper, easily
affordable even on Social Security. Over the past few years, with
the coming of the diamond ships, the heavy-booster market had
gone into free fall, and unemployment had rocketed. The dole was
paid by her department out of the rent from Mutual Protection,
and it couldn’t last. Nostalgia tourism – the old
spaceport was now a World Heritage Site, for what that was worth
-looked like the only promising source of employment.
    Before she knew it, the horse had stopped, from habit, outside
the modest ten-storey concrete office-block of the
republic’s government on Revolution Square. Myra sat still
for a moment, gazing wryly at this week’s morale-boosting
poster on the official billboard: a big black-and-white blow-up
of the classic Tass photo of Gagarin, grinning out from his
cosmonaut helmet. She remembered the time, in her grade-school
classroom on the Lower East Side, when she’d first seen
this human face and had formed some synaptic connection between
Gagarin’s grin and Guevara’s glare.
    Space and socialism. What a swindle it had all been. She shook
the reins, took the mare at a slow pace around to the back,
stabled it, wiped the muck from her boots and ascended the
stairs. The corridors to her office – at the front of the
building, as befitted a People’s Commissar for Social
Policy and Prime Minister Pro Tern and (now that she came to
think about it) Acting President – were