Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

Jesus. I’d go on strike.’ She struck
a guitar-holding pose, sang nasally, ‘Ain’t gonna
play Sim City…’
    Sadie laughed. ‘Until your management reboots
you.’
    Myra was laughing too, but it chilled her to think of this new
way for the rich to desert the Earth, not to space but to
cyberspace, with their bank accounts; to live for ever on
television, where their faces had always been. And what a laugh
it would be if, in their silicon heaven, they were to meet the
General…
    Ah, shit. Back to business.
    ‘Is this car secure to talk?’ she asked, suddenly
sure that the restaurant wouldn’t be.
    Sadie waved a languid hand. ‘Doesn’t
matter,’ she said. ‘I know what you have to offer
– the fact that you asked to see me kinda gives it
away, yeah?’
    ‘Seeing you put it like that… but the
devil’s in the details.’
    ‘We don’t need to worry about the details,’
Sadie said. ‘Not tonight. Just a little discretion and
circumlocution, and we’ll be fine.’
    Myra smiled thinly. Probably Sadie knew a lot of the details.
It was still her job to keep track of nuclear deployments. Her
eyeband – Myra ^guessed the fine sparkly band around
Sadie’s forehead was an eyeband – would show her
every suspected tac nuke on Earth and off it. And she’d
have a shrewd idea where Myra’s strategic nukes were,
too.
    Myra glanced out of the window. The car was making reasonable
speed up… Amsterdam Avenue, getting to the high numbers.
The old buildings were blistered, the pavements cluttered with
nano-built squatter shacks like spider bubbles, linked by webbed
stairways and ladders and swing-ropes. Their dwellers, and the
people on the street, werein this part mostly white.
Office-workers, mostly Black and Hispanic, threaded their way
among the crowds, ignoring their importunity.
    ‘Middle-American refugees,’ Sadie said.
‘Okies.’
    The restaurant, when they reached it a few minutes later, was
well into the Harlem spillover. Black flight had long since
changed the character of the area; Myra and Sadie stepped across
the stall-cluttered pavement under the incurious, inscrutable
stares of Peruvians and Chileans. It looked like an America where
the Indians had won. In fact, these Indians had lost everything
they had to the Gonzal-istas, a decade or two earlier. The
Gonzalistas had been defeated, but their intended victims had no
intention of leaving the US. Now the former refugees’ petty
commerce filled the offices and shop-fronts and spilled on to the
pavements, just as their huge families filled the old
public-housing projects.
    But still, Myra thought, getting away from the killing peaks
at all was winning. The Gonzalistas had been a nasty bunch, even
for commies; the kind who would dismiss Pol Pot as a
revisionist.
    The restaurant was called Los Malvinas. Inside it was crowded,
mainly with young old-money Latinos, preppily dressed, snootily
confident of their social and racial superiority over the newer
immigrants on the streets but exploiting – in their
fashion-statements as in other ways – their cultural
connection. The air smelt meaty and smoky, the walls had huge
posters of Peron, Eva, Che, Lady Thatcher and Madonna. Sadie was
welcomed by name by an attentive head waiter who escorted them to
a table out the back, in a small yard enclosed by trees and
creeper-covered walls.
    ‘Nice place,’ Myra said. She looked down themenu.
‘Doesn’t look like it’ll take a big chunk out
of the company card, either.’
    ‘Knew you’d like it,’ Sadie said. She
shrugged her bolero on to the chairback, revealing her bare
shoulders. ‘Jug of sangria?’
    ‘Good idea.’ Myra tapped the menu.
‘You’ll have to advise me on this. Just as well
I’m not a vegetarian.’
    They put together an order which Sadie assured her would be
both good and huge, and sipped sangria and smoked a joint and
gnawed garlic-oil-dipped bread while waiting for it.
    ‘OK,’ said Myra. She glanced around, reflexively.
Half a dozen Venezuelan oil engineers, in shirts and shorts, were
talking loudly around the only other occupied table; she shrugged
and shook her head. ‘OK. Let’s talk. Hope you
don’t mind me saying, but, hell. You got authority to
negotiate at the level we’re talking about?’
    ‘Sure,’ Sadie told her. ‘Don’t worry
about that. Straight line to the top. Not that this is one of the
Boss’s top priorities, mind