Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

the great imperialists, Churchill and Mountbatten and Johnson and
people of that ilk.
    Her shoes were kicked off under a chair, the black crepe and
devore dress was across the back of thechair, the’ sable
hat was flung in a corner, the black fur coat was on the floor,
the whisky bottle was open on the table and Leonard Cohen’s
black lyrics disturbed the smoky air: Manhattan, then Berlin,
indeed.
    Myra was having one of her bad nights.
    The late-spring night outside the thin, old curtains was cold,
and the central-heating radiator didn’t do much to hold
back the chill. The main room of the flat felt small, almost
cramped, like a student bedsit She had a kitchen, a bathroom, a
bedroom; but most of what defined her life was crammed into this
living-room. The shelves were lined with books, two or three rows
deep, though she had the entire 2045 edition (the last) of the
Library of Congress, sharing space with its Sterling search
engine on a freebie disk somewhere in the clutter. Her music, her
computer software and hardware, her pictures, all were piled up
in similarly silted layers of technological generations, with the
most recent stuff at the top or on the outside, and everything
back to CDs and PCs and even, at some pre-Cambrian level, vinyl,
in the strata below. She had, in her eyeband, ready access to any
scene on Earth or off it, but she still had posters on the
walls.
    Once, these posters had consisted mainly of old advertisements
for the ISTWR’s exports. But in recent years, one by one,
the tacked-up shots of liftoffs and payloads, missiles and
explosions had been tugged down in moments of shame and fury, to
be crumpled and binned, and replaced by scenes of Kazakh nature
and tradition. Mountains and meadows, horsemen and peasants,
dancers in embroidered costumes – a whole oriental
Switzerland of tourist attractions. Kazakhstan was not doing too
badly, even today. It had moved away from its disastrous,
Soviet-era polluting industries and extractive monocultures, and
put its prairies to a more productive and natural use in
cattle-raising. The Kazakh horsemen were back in the saddle.
    Myra leaned back and stretched. It was nearly midnight.
She’d had far too much to drink. Her few hours in the bar
with Valentina had been followed by an hour or two of drinking on
her own. She was so drunk she was lucid, ‘fleeing’ as
Dave used to call it. Or possibly she was sobering up, smoothly
and gradually, and was in the state where repeated applications
of the hair of the dog were postponing the inevitable hammer-blow
of the hangover. But drunk or sober, with or without Reid’s
antinomian justification, she had to act. She had to reach the
International.
    There were two Internationals (‘for large values of
two’ as Reid had once put it, alluding to the numerous
splits): the Second and the Fourth. When most people talked about the International, they meant the Second – the
successor of the one that had torn itself apart in 1914, and had
painfully reassembled its severed limbs in the course of three
world wars, five world slumps and one successful world
revolution. Even today it was massive: the Socialist
International’s affiliated parties and trade unions and
co-operatives and militias had an aggregate membership in the
tens of millions, still.
    What Myra meant, and Valentina meant, and Georgi had meant by the International was a less imposing institution, a
remnant of a fragment, most of it embedded in the greater body of
the Second, a splinter travelling slowly through its veins. The
Fourth International’s membership was in the low thousands,
scattered around the world – and, as Valentina had reminded
her, off the world, thanks toits pioneering efforts at unionising
the space rigs back in the 2020s. It was now almost dormant, a
tenuous network of old comrades who couldn’t quite say
goodbye to each other, or to the dreams of their fervent younger
days.
    The radical sects of the English Revolution, the Muggletonians
and Gameronians and Fifth Monarchy Men, had persisted as
dwindling, marginal congregations for centuries after their
Kingdom had failed to come; so it would be, Myra thought, for the
erstwhile partisans of the Fourth. She knew that, but still she
had paid her dues.
    Now it was time to get something back for her money. For a
start, she could find out what her comrades had done with her
country’s nukes.
     
    Myra flew