Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

reddened, her fingers blackened and her shoulders
ached.
    Most of the books, too, went to the bazaar. The remainder she
had loaded in the back of a small truck. She washed herself and
looked around the echoing emptiness of her flat. It was still
habitable; it was a place to which she could return; but in it
nothing of herself remained.
    She shoved her 2045 Library of Congress and her other
libraries and concert halls, art galleries and archives into the
top of her overnight bag, and distributed her knives and pistols
about her belts and pockets. The lads who’d lugged her
stuff to the market came back one by one, with sheaves of money.
She peeled off more than enough to pay them, one by one.
    The truck with the books went ahead of her, well ahead, as she
hefted her overnight bag and herself on to the horse, and rode
out for the last time to the camp.
     
    ‘Open up!’
    Myra yelled, rattling the iron gate. The truck had parked
itself in front, waiting with robotic patience for the obstacle
to clear. Any electronic pleas it had made had evidently been
ignored.
    Myra could see why. There wasn’t much left of the camp
but the fence, and away to one side – too far away to be
useful for her – she could see men taking it apart with
wire-cutters and rolling it up in great bales and wheels. Nothing
but grass and roadway stretched ahead of her for a few hundred
metres. Where the huts had been she could see only clumps of dark
material on the steppe, with men and women wandering around and
children racing about. The factories were not gone, but they were
visibly shrivelling, as though their construction were being run
in reverse.
    She flipped down her eyeband, upped the gain, gazed at the
scene. Nobody’d heard her shouts. Damn. She eased her old
New Vietcong knock-off Glock from its holster, steadied and
soothed the horse, and fired not into the air but carefully at a
tussock a few tens of metres distant. The mare shied and the
bullet ricocheted anyway, but the shot got the result she wanted.
A figure detached itself from the milling crowd and marched
towards her. Kim Nok-Yung, carrying a rifle.
    ‘Hi, Myra.’ He couldn’t stop smiling. He
tapped a code into the lock’s plate. The gate creaked open,
and he left it open. Myra led the horse through, and the truck
followed, then kept pace beside her. Nok-Yung hopped on the
running-board and hung on with one hand, flourishing the rifle
triumphantly with the other, as if he was riding a tank into a
liberated capital.
    Isn’t this great!’
    She got caught up in his enthusiasm.
    ‘Yes, it’s wonderful. I’m so glad it’s
over, Nok-Yung.’
    They passed one of the factories, vanishing before their eyes,
crumbling back from its edges into curiously ordered dust, dust
that trickled like columns of ants along paths on the remaining
machinery, or on the grass. Some of the dust heaped itself up
into blocky stacks that hardened into colour-coded cubes, inert,
from which the wind blew not a speck. Other lines of dust
coalesced into glassy spheroids, obsidian-black or crystal-clear,
that lay in the tall grass like gleaming pebbles and stones and
boulders.
    ‘Control components, computers and so on,’
Nok-Yung indicated. ‘The cubes are construction
material.’
    ‘Will anyone collect them, I wonder?’
    The Korean laughed. ‘We’ll take some of the
control parts with us – they might be valuable, where
we’re going.’
    ‘Oh?’
    He glanced sidelong at her, almost apologetic.
‘Semipalatinsk,’ he said. ‘To the
Sheenisov.’
    Myra restrained herself from reining in the horse.
‘What? Why, for God’s sake?’ She waved an arm,
wildly, around and behind. ‘You can stay with us
-you’re welcome here, in our republic or anywhere in
Kazakhstan. Hey, man, Baikonur will take you on, think of
that!’
    He shook his head. ‘Some of the prisoners will setde
here, of course. But I and Se-Ha and the others, we are going to
the Sheenisov. Some of us have friends and family with them
already. There is no other place for us. Even with Mutual
Protection -’ he turned aside and spat on the grass
‘- gone, we still have the debts, and the black-lists. No
work to be had back home but debt-bondage. Among the Sheenisov we
will be free.’ He grinned, no longer apologetic but feral.
‘And there is work to be done there – work for us.
They are the future.’
    ‘But you don’t know anything about what