Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

air.
I’mgoing out. Could you tell Menial to come out too?’
‘Sure,’ he said, already scanning the crowd for other
company. ‘Where’ll you be?’ ‘In the
square,’ I said. ‘At the statue.’

 
14
Final Analysis
     
     
    To Almaty then, and apple-blossom on the streets, smoke in the
air, and the Tian-Shan mountains beyond; so high, so close they
were improbable to the eye, like the moon on the horizon. Myra
almost skipped with relief to be back in Kazakhstan.
    President Chingiz Suleimanyov’s office was a lot grander
than Myra’s. She felt a tremor of trepidation as she walked
past the soldier who held the door open for her. A ten-metre
strip of red carpet over polished parquet, at the end of which
was a small chair in front of a large desk. The chair was
plastic. The desk was mahogany, its green leather top bare except
for a gold Mont Blanc pen and a pristine, red-leather-edged
blotter. Glass-paned bookcases on either side of the room
converged to a wide window with a mountain view. The room’s
central chandelier, unlit at the moment, looked like a
landing-craft from an ancient and impressive alien civilisation
making its presence known.
    The President stood up as she came in, and walked around his
intimidating desk. They met witha handshake. Suleimanyov was a
short, well-built Kazakh with a face which he’d carefully
kept at an avuncular-looking fiftyish. He was actually in his
fifty-eighth year, a child of the century as he occasionally
mentioned, which meant that he’d grown up after the
Glorious Counter-Revolution of 1991 had passed into history. The
reunification of Kazakhstan in the Fall Revolution had been his
finest hour, and he always called himself a Kazakhstani, not a
Kazakh: the national identification, not the ethnic. He
didn’t have any of Myra’s twentieth-century leftist
hang-ups. He had never had the slightest pretension to being any
kind of socialist. However, he followed Soviet tradition by
wearing the neatest and most conventional business-suit that
dollars could buy.
    ‘Good afternoon, Citizen Davidova,’ he said, in
Russian. She responded similarly, and then he waved her to her
seat and resumed his own. The soldier closed the door.
    ‘Ah, Myra my friend,’ Suleimanyov said, this time
in BBC World Service English, ‘let’s drop the
formality. I’ve read your reports on your mission.’
He gestured with his hands as though letting a book fall open.
‘What a mess. Though I must say you are looking
good.’
    ‘I’m sorry that I was not more successful,
President Suleimanyov – ’
    ‘Chingiz, please. And no need to apologise.’ He
pinched the bridge of his nose, closing his eyes for a moment. He
looked tired. ‘I don’t see how anyone else could have
done better. Your action in leaving Great Britain was
perhaps… impetuous, but even with hindsight it will
probably turn out to have been for the best. What a long way down
they’ve come, the English. As for the Americans –
well, what can Isay?’ He chuckled, with a certain schadenfreude, and gazed upwards at the crystal
mother-ship. ‘Fifteen years ago they were stamping their
will on the whole planet, and now a few nuclear weapons are too
hot for them to handle. In my father’s time they were
willing to contemplate taking multiple nuclear hits
themselves.’ He looked back from his reminiscence to Myra.
‘Sorry,’ he said, suddenly abashed, ‘no offence
intended. I forget sometimes that you were - are – an
American.’
    ‘No offence taken,’ Myra said. ‘I entirely
agree with your assessment. What a crock of shit the place is!
What a pathetic lot they are! The chance of a long life has only
made them more afraid of death than ever.’
    The President’s bushy eyebrows twitched. ‘It has
not done that for you, then?’
    Myra shook her head. ‘I can see the rationality of it
– people think they have more life to lose if they have a
long one to look forward to – but I think it’s a
false logic. A long life of oppression or shame is worse than a
short one, after all.’
    She stopped, and looked at him quizzically. He smiled.
    ‘True, we are not here to discuss philosophy,’ he
said. ‘Nevertheless, I’m happy that you think it
better to die free than to live as slaves. We may get the chance
some day, but let’s try to delay our heroic deaths for a
bit, eh?’
    ‘Yes indeed.’ She wanted very badly to smoke, but
the