Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

filled with a
susurrus of hurrying feet and fast-fading whispers. Myra glanced
sharply at the groups she passed, but few seemed willing to
return her look.
    She closed the door of her office with a futile but
soul-satisfying slam. Let the apparatchiks worry about her mood,
if she had to worry about theirs. The last time she’d
sniffed this evasive air in the corridors had been just before
the first – and only -time she’d fallen out of power,
back in 2046. Then, she’d suspected an imminent move from
the Mutual Protection company and its proteges within the state
apparatus: a coup d’etat Now, she suspected that
Mutual Protection and its allies were into the final moves of a
much wider game-plan, as wide as itcould be: a coup du
monde. Or coup d’etoile!
    She stalked to the window, shedding her coat and hat and
gloves in quick, violent movements, leaned on her knuckles on the
sill and scanned her surroundings in a spasm of fang-baring
territoriality. No tanks or tramping feet sounded in her
city’s streets, no black helicopters clattered in her
country’s sky. What did she expect? There were days at
least to go before anything happened – and, when it did,
the opening blows would be overt in larger capitals than hers;
she’d be nipped by CNN soundbites in the new order’s
first seconds.
    She sighed and turned away, picked up her dropped clothes and
hung them carefully on the appropriate branches of a
chrome-plated rack. The office was as self-consciously
retro-modernist as the styles on the street, if a little more
sophisticated -pine walls and floor, lobate leather layers at
random on both; ornaments in steel and silver, ebony and plastic,
of planetary globes and interplanetary craft. She dropped into
the office chair and leaned back, letting it massage her
shoulders and neck. She slid the band across her eyes, summoned a
head-up display and rolled her eyes to study it. The anti-viral
‘ware playing across her retinae flickered, but there was
nothing untoward for it to report; here, as in all the offices,
the walls had teeth. Her own software was wrapped around her, its
loyalty as intimate, and as hard to subvert, as the enhanced
immune-systems in her blood. It was personal, it was a personal, a unique configuration of software agents that scanned
the world and Myra’s responses to the world, and built up
from that interaction a shrewd assessment of her needs and
interests. It looked out information for her, and it looked after
her investments. It did to the world nets what her Sterlingsearch
engine did for her Library – it selected and extracted what
was relevant from the vast and choppy sea of data in which most
people swam or, more often, drowned.
    Having a good suite of personal ‘ware was slighdy more
important for a modern politician than the traditional personal
networks of influence and intelligence. In the decade since
she’d recovered power, Myra had made sure that her networks
-both kinds, virtual and actual – were strong and
intertwined, strong enough to carry her if the structure of the
state ever again let her down. Though even that was unlikely
– her purges, though bloodless, had been as ruthless as
Tito’s. No official of the ISTWR would ever again have the
slightest misapprehension of where their best interests lay, and
no employee or agent of Mutual Protection would fancy their
chances of changing that.
    She’d have to consult with the rest of Sovnarkom soon
enough – a meeting was scheduled for 3 p.m. – and
round up some of the scurrying underlings from the corridors to
prepare for it, but she wanted to get her own snapshot of the
situation first.
    Myra’s personal didn’t have a personality, as far
as she knew, but it had a persona: a revolutionary, a
stock-market speculator, an arms dealer, a spy; a freewheeling,
high-rolling, all-swindling communist-capitalist conspirator out
of some Nazi nightmare. It had a name.
    Tarvus,’ she whispered. The retinal projectors on her
eyeband summoned an image of a big man in a baggy suit and a
shirt stretched across his belly like a filled sail, scudding
along on gales of information. He strolled towards her, smiling,
his pockets stuffed with papers, his cigarette hand waving as he
prepared to tell her something. She’d never comeacross a
recording of the original Parvus in action, but she’d given
this one the appearance of one historic Trotskyist leader,