Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

about the slave camps, then.’
    ‘What?’ For a fleeting instant, I literally saw a
black shadow before my eyes. I pointed at the seer-stone’s
script. ‘I thought you were talking about the nuclear
blackmail!’
    Menial looked puzzled. ‘Nuclear blackmail? I know she
got some nuclear weapons from the Pa-panich, that’s
right here. What has that to do with how she made her
living?’
    ‘Oh, Reason above!’ I clutched my head.
‘Let’s get this straight. You think the dirty
secret is that she ran slave camps. I think it’s
that she trafficked in nuclear threats.’
    Menial sighed. ‘Yes, that’s it.’ She
unfurled her hand and forearm with parodied politeness. Tou
first.’
    ‘All right’ I noticed that my left knee was
juddering up and down; I stood up, and paced the floor as I
spoke. ‘You know about nuclear detenence?’
    ‘Oh, aye,’ she said, with a grimace.
    ‘Well, yes, to us the policy of threatening to burn to
death many great cities and their inhabitants seems wicked, but
the ancients didn’t see it that way.
    In fact, some of them began to see nuclear deterrence as a
good, which like all goods would be better bought and sold by
businesses than provided by governments. The trouble was, all
nuclear weapons were owned by governments, and were impossible to
buy and hard to steal.
    ‘So Myra Godwin and her husband, Georgi Davi-dov, stole
a government. Davidov was a military man, and he carried out a
military coup in a part of Kazakhstan, in a region which was very
unpleasant and barren but which did happen to have a large
stockpile of nuclear weapons. In a way, what happened was that
the soldiers who manned the nuclear weapons decided to claim some
territory, and nobody dared gainsay them.
    The local people had suffered grievously under the rule of the
Communists. Stalin had starved at least a million of them in the
1930s. But things had improved a lot, and after the fall of the
Communists they found themselves worse off under the lairds and
barons and usurers. The real answer to their problems was not
known at the time, or not known widely enough, and they began to
hanker for the secure if limited life they had known before.
    ‘This was where Myra and Georgi had their stroke of
genius. While Myra was studying here she was a follower of a man
called Trotsky, who had been killed by Stalin and who became a
banner for a different kind of communism, purged of
Stalin’s crimes. As if there could be such a
thing!’
    ‘What do you mean?’ Menial asked, narrow-eyed.
    ‘Oh, come on, you know, communism – ’
The word made me physically nauseous, as though dirty hands were
pawing me. ‘Everybody minding each other’s business,
everybody owned by everybody else, and that’s just
the ideal! What could that be but evil? Let alone the reality, of
a small ruling group doing the minding and the owning!’
    ‘How did that help the Deliverer?’
    I shrugged. ‘She may have believed it when she was
young. Nobody’s perfect. But when the Davidovs set up their
state, they did so in the name of Trotsky, even though they did
not really believe in him any more. They kept enough communism to
keep people secure, and enough freedom to let them be happy and
rich.’
    Menial’s face was set in an interested but carefully
neutral expression.
    ‘And the way they got rich,’ I went on, ‘was
this. They started selling options to use the nuclear weapons
they held. That way, states that had no nuclear weapons of their
own could have nuclear deterrence. They were quite open about it,
but they had to stop after the Third World War, when the last
empire consolidated its grip.’
    I sighed and shrugged. ‘It’s a blot on her record,
I’ll give you that. But they never actually used
them.’
    Menial looked a bit shaken. ‘So the scholars have known
that all along? Well, I know what Godwin’s people did after
they lost their little nuclear threat business.’ She
smiled, thin-lipped. ‘It seems you don’t’
    She opened the other file. This one, which I read with growing
honor, was about a very different contract. It was a monthly
report on work done by prisoners, guarded by a company called
Mutual Protection, for another company called Space
Merchants.
    ‘Prison labour was another good,’ Menial
said, ‘that our Deliverer thought best to supply on the
free market.’
    ‘But that’s slavery!’
    ‘Indeed it is,’ said Merrial.