Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [245]
My father, sitting at the breakfast table, peered at me over his copy of the Manchester Guardian.
‘The Russians have sent a rocket into space,’ he told me. ‘Way up in the sky, going right around the world.’ He traced a circle in the air with his forefinger.
I felt disturbed by this. The Russians were in my mind a vague, vast menace. They had done something unpleasant and unfair to a friend of my father’s, an old gentleman whose photograph was framed above the fireplace: Karl Marx. The Russians had distorted him. Whatever that was, it sounded painful.
I zoomed the toy rocket up and when it reached the limit of my arm’s reach, I turned it and brought it down, nose-first. Its shape, I noticed for the first time, was just like a bomb. I had once seen a bomb being craned cautiously out of a garden at the end of the road, in front of two policemen, a dozen soldiers and a fascinated crowd. It had been buried in the ground for ten years after the war between the British and the German capitalists.
‘Does that mean they can send bombs through space?’
My father had returned to his paper, perhaps disappointed by my preoccupied response to his exciting news, and now lowered it again and gave me a brightening look.
‘Yes!’ he said cheerfully. ‘That’s exactly what it means. Very clever, Jonathan. And now the Americans and everybody else will build rockets and put bombs on them.’
My mother frowned at him.
‘But it’s all right,’ my father hastened to add, as he stood up and shook out his napkin and folded his paper. ‘The workers won’t let them use the bombs. We’ll stop them, won’t we?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We’ll stop them.’
I knew from playing with other boys in the street that my parents’ views were not widely held in Streatham, but I also knew that all around the world, even in far-away countries like Austria and New Zealand, there were people who agreed with them. Altogether there were hundreds and hundreds of them.
This mighty force would stop the bomb. I went back to playing happily with my rocket, and my father went whistling off to catch the train that carried the wage-slaves to work.
‘Reid told me he had a surprise,’ I babbled, ‘but I must say I’m knocked flat. How on earth did you end up here?’
Myra smirked. She looked well, and I could almost believe she hadn’t aged much in forty years, but that was just part of the same illusion that kept me from feeling old myself. You could see the papery texture of her skin, the crinkles in its still impressive tightness.
‘I came here in the ’nineties,’ she explained, ‘to do research, and then I just realised that these people needed help and that I enjoyed giving it. They still had a lot of bad shit from the tests, and they had one hell of a brain-drain as well. They needed any educated person they could get, and I was able to fix a lot of aid from US medical charities. Then I fell for an army officer, we got married, and luckily for us he was on the winning side of several civil wars and military coups and the re-revolution. So here I am, People’s Commissar for Social Policy.’ She waved a hand. ‘They let me sign treaties whenever I want, so I don’t feel like I’m stuck with the domestic issues.’ She laughed. ‘You know, women’s work!’
I shook my head. ‘So Reid’s become a capitalist, and you’ve become a bureaucrat – dammit, I’m the only one who’s still a revolutionary!’
‘I am not a bureaucrat,’ Myra said, with some hauteur. ‘I was elected, in a real election. We do have democracy, you know.’
Reid was taking documents from his briefcase and spreading them on the table. ‘Yes Myra, you sure won over your dashing young lieutenant.