Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

which had
been her purest, fiercest flame. She had thought nuclearweapons
the vilest work of man, whose very possession contaminated, and
whose mere testing was murderous.
    Nurup Kerbayev and Mustafa Altynsaryn, her proudly
counter-revolutionary bodyguards, strolled a polite step or two
behind her, beards and bandoliers bristling, Kalashnikovs slung
on their shoulders. Nurup was ethnically Kazakh-Russian; Mustafa
looked more Mongoloid, almost Han Chinese. With their AKs and
baggy pants and scuffed boots and bulging jackets they both
looked just like counterrevolutionary bandits. They also looked
like Sheen-isov soldiery or the local population, whom the
Sheenisov had encouraged to carry arms as a deterrent to
counter-revolutionary banditry.
    They walked down the streets and across the squares quite
unchallenged, though one or two people gave Myra a curious
glance, as though recognising her from her television appearance
the previous evening. Apart from the parked tanks on the
street-corners, around each of which a curious crowd, mainly of
children and young people, fraternised with the relaxed-looking
crew, the town so far showed litde sign of being caught up in a
social revolution. It was the weird fighting-machines that were
alarming. They stalked and lurched about like Martian invaders;
but the locals treated them with casual familiarity, like traffic
or street-furniture. Perhaps, Myra thought wryly, it was the
absence of searing heat-rays and writhing metal tentacles that
did the trick.
    As well as those combat drones, big clunky
calculating-machines were being installed, indoors in shop-fronts
and factories, outdoors in the squares. Gears and teeth and
crystal spheres, building to frenetic orreries of some alternate
solar system, Copernican with Ptolemaic epicyles. Nanotech
dripped and congealed around the brass and steel, like epoxy that
never quite set. Around noon Myra and her companions watched one
being winched off a flatbed truck and placed carefully in a plaza
below a cosmonaut monument.
    Tucking bizarre,’ said Myra, half to herself, as a
Sheenisov cadre clambered on to the plinth and began an
explanatory harangue in Uzbek, not one of her languages.
    ‘With this they will replace the market,’ Nurup
scoffed, under his breath. ‘God help us all.’
    A lively market in soft drinks and hot food was already
forming around the strange device. Nurup and Mustafa bought her
Coke and kebabs, and themselves a hotdog each. Both talked
quietly to the stall-keepers. Taking the food, they sat down on a
bench and ate.
    ‘There is much discontent,’ Mustafa said
eagerly.
    ‘Bazaar gossip,’ Nurup said. ‘Stall-keepers
will tell you anything. They will tell the Sheenisov they love
them.’
    The two men argued obliquely but intensely for a few minutes
about the prospects for terrorist action against the
Sheenisov.
    ‘We’re not here for that,’ Myra reminded
them. She shared out cigarettes, then together they walked out of
the square. Neither of the men raised any questions about her
random following of the streets, until they ended up at the bank
of the broad Irtysh river. Flats on the opposite bank, a
riverside walk on this. A small pleasure steamer chugged
downriver, ferrying a calculating-machine on its promenade
deck.
    Myra leaned against a railing, gazing into the river. The two
men leaned against the railing, looking the other way. People
passed. After a few minutes of this Mustafa asked what was going
on.
    ‘Nothing,’ said Myra, not turning around.
‘Or maybe something. I’m assuming we’ve been
followed, or watched. I’m quite prepared to wait here for
at least an hour. Make yourselves comfortable.’
    But they were too edgy and too alert to be comfortable. The
most they did was light another of her Dunhills. Myra slipped her
eyeband down and was at once struck by a sense of deja vu, as the whole scene around her hazed over, sleeted with grey
flecks. After a moment she realised the source of that sense of
recognition – it reminded her of how she’d first seen
towns like this, back in the 90s: through their Soviet pollution
haze. She blinked, moved the eyeband up and down, tried to pick
up the nets. Nothing but the grey snow. Even Parvus. summoned
from memory, looked frazzled by it.
    Sheenisov jamming. Shit.
    She’d just given up this experiment when she heard her
name called. She turned. Shin Se-Ha and Kim Nok-Yung walked