Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

should have done long ago. Now,
thinking it over, she found it difficult to disentangle her
reasons for procrastinating. It wasn’t that the process was
unaffordable, or even obscenely privileged – many of her
own citizens and employees had made a trip to some Western
clinic. Dodgy black-market strains of the relevant nanoware
circulated wherever health services existed at all, and patches
for their shortcomings were a widespread and legitimate trade.
But Myra’d never gotten around to it, partly because she
had been satisfied with her present condition – attractive
enough to pull interesting and interested men, fit enough for her
work and her undemanding exercise routines, but in no way good
enough to fool anyone that she was actually young, once theysaw
more of her than her face, or saw her face close up.
    Another aspect, she realised, was a certain patriotic
stubbornness, of the kind that kept her driving her ancient Skoda
Traverser. She didn’t want to buy youth from… not so
much the West as…the new breed, the post-nanotech
generation. She ^vanted to muddle along with the fixes that had
worked for her so far: the Swiss collagen jabs, the British
circulatory-system microbots, the Georgian bacteriophage
immune-system back-ups, the Vietnamese phytochemical neural
regenerators, the American telomere hack… all assembled in
a post-Soviet package deal that the health services of the Former
Union and the communistans had been doling out for decades.
    The Kazakhstani President had taken about thirty seconds to
persuade her that it was her personal right and patriotic duty to
go for the full works, the one-shot nanotech silver bullet for
death. Freed from the burden of responsibility for the ISTWR,
given a mission on which even history might some day smile, that
legitimacy somehow legitimised her selfish stab at
immortality.
    But still, memento mori, when her mind drifted the
words came back.
    Death follows me.
     
    She thought that death had caught her several times over the
next few hours. The journey from Izmir’s airport, Adnan
Menderes, to Olu Deniz on the Aegean coast was terrifying, even
in the armoured limo. It wasn’t just the hairpin bends, the
appalling driving, the precipitous drops and – after
nightfall -the way the headlamp beams swung out into empty black
space. It was all that, and the dead men.
    The car had just laboured up an incline, overtaking a couple
of coaches with centimetres to spare between the booming metal of
the coaches on one side, and a tyre-width away from the drop on
the other, and two seconds to get out of the way of an oncoming
truck. In the crook of the bend, a stand of pine a little away
from the main forest; three bloodied men hanging from the
branches, by the neck, dead. The mind retained from the sight a
shocking impression of absences: at the faces, at the ends of
limbs, at the crotch. Blink and you’d miss it.
    Myra yelped. The driver’s gaze met hers in the mirror.
The crinkles around his eyes deepened to a smile.
    ‘Greek partisans.’
    He started telling her the story, of how Izmir had once been
Smyrna before Kemal liberated the nation, and had – only
thirty-five years ago – been Smyrna again, and the airport
had been named after the Greek fascist Grivas rather than the
Turkish democrat Menderes, and how the Greeks had begun to
re-colonise, and how the New Turks had risen to again drive out
the Hellenic chauvinist pawns of imperialism, and… and so
on. Myra listened intently to the long, winding tale of
nationalist grievance; it distracted her, it kept her mind off
all but the worst of the roadside attractions and the most
heart-stopping turns in the road. This was a place where the
small wars were real, with no simulations played and no quarter
given.
    Why had Suleimanyov booked her into a clinic here, of all
places? She knew the answer had something to do with the complex
diplomacy of the rest of her journey – the Turkish
Federation was as usual in dispute with the Russians, who were
backing theBulgars and Serbs and Greeks, and most of the US
successor regimes were backing Turkey, and Kazakhstan’s
on-again-off-again relations with the rest of the Former Union
were currently in ‘off’ mode, so…
    But still.
    At last, in the darkness, she saw that they were heading down
a long incline, towards the bottom of a valley that opened to the
sea. Lights dotted along the roadside and along