Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

-to be so sure. To be absolutely
certain that she was right would, as far as she was concerned, be
the end of her. Doubt was her only hope, her comfort and
companion since childhood, her scepticism her sole security.
    Shin Se-Ha returned and sat down, affecting not to notice
their frozen moment of mutual incomprehension. He looked at Myra,
gravely, and shook his head.
    ‘No deal, I’m afraid.’
    Myra could scarcely believe it.
    ‘Why ever not? The alternative is to fight your way
through Kazakhstan! All you have to do instead is not fight us!
What more can you ask of us?’
    Se-Ha shook his head sadly. ‘It is not that,
Myra,’ he said. ‘It is not aggression, or animosity.
It is simply the imperative of our mode of production. It will be
global or it will be nothing, as your Trotsky always said. We
have to keep running, or fall over, until we meet ourselves, on
the other side of the world.’
    He saw this wasn’t getting anywhere with her.
‘More concretely,’ he continued, ‘we
can’t have… unassimilated areas within the Union. It
would be too much of an opportunity for our enemies. And we
can’t stop for long, because that would force us to engage
in internal class struggle, particularly with the small-property
owners, which we do not want’ He smiled. To put it mildly!
We have so far been able to avoid the whole dictatorship of the
proletariat scenario by simply carrying the remaining small and
large businesses along with us. The machine-based common-property
economy expands, and they expand in its interstices. They can
live like nits in our hair, as long as we are running. If we
stopped, the itch would be intolerable. We would have
to… scratch’
    ‘Oh, come on,’ said Myra. ‘You can run a
mixed economy indefinitely. We’ve been doing it in Kapi-tsa
for years.’
    ‘A mixture of state capitalism and private, yes,’
said Nok-Yung, ‘as you’ve just reminded me. A mixture
of a real non-commodity economy and a market is much more
unstable. Conflicts arise very rapidly – if they’re
both confined to the same economic space.’
    An unstable system, that had to expand at just the right speed
to stop itself falling over; not too slow, or too fast … there were plenty of natural and artificial
and social analogies to that. Myra almost giggled at the thought
of what would happen to them if Kazakhstan just surrendered, if
the Sheenisov suddenly found themselves pushing at an open door
and fell flat on their collective faces.
    But that wasn’t an option. She looked around, checking
that her guards were still bored and watchful, then back at the
two new recruits to the Sheenisov. The absurdity of the situation
struck her – she was doing diplomacy by just talking to two
guys on the street. For all she knew they could be as deluded as
UFO contactees, and not really ambassadors from an alien
intelligence at all. Again she felt the urge to giggle – it
was just another silly idea; she was feeling light-headed,
flighty, as though her problem had been solved. She
couldn’t see any solution. She was in deeper trouble
than ever, but still she felt relieved.
    ‘There is a certain urgency to it,’ Se-Ha was
saying, a litde apologetically. ‘Green factions are
experimenting with plague vectors. The spacer groups, the
Outwarders, have a radically post-human vision. Between them,
they threaten humanity with extinction. Our advance is in essence
defensive…’
    She looked sharply at him. ‘Tell me, Se-Ha,’ she
said, ‘just who it was you consulted, back
there.’
    He looked uncomfortable. ‘It was… a distributed
decision. A consensus.’
    ‘‘BuHlshitV she snapped. ‘Don’t
give me that. Ididn’t see a vote being taken in the streets
around here. Did you? So there must be a leadership somewhere, a
council. I want to talk to it’
    ‘You are talking to it,’ he said, ‘when you
talk to us. To the extent that it exists. The policy parameters
have indeed been set democratically, but the implementation,
the… administrative decisions, are made…’ He
chewed his lower lip. ‘It’s hard to say,’ he
finished lamely.
    ‘Let me guess,’ said Myra, standing up.
‘Expert system. AI.’
    Se-Ha looked up at her, eyes dark and blank under his thin
black brows. ‘That is possible, yes.’
    Myra straightened and sighed. She was convinced, paranoically
perhaps, that the mad preacher Jordan had been right: the
General, the