Fractions_ The First Half of the Fall Revolution - Ken MacLeod [294]
‘In Kazakhstan?’
‘In the world, stupid!’
I really did feel stupid. That, or she was crazy.
‘For fuck sake, who? And how?’
‘Your space movement – OK, maybe not yours, but – anyway, they had people in the official space programmes, even in Space Defense. And they can see how things are going, since the Fall Revolution. “Fall” is right! Everything’s falling apart – it’s like a global version of the Soviet breakup. Another few months, years at most, and there won’t be a rocket lifting from anywhere. The word is, it’s now or never if we’re ever to get a permanent space presence. We’re in what they call a resource trap.’
That at least fitted with what I’d seen, and what Annette had suspected.
‘I’ll take that for a “why”,’ I said. ‘I asked who, and how. Even SD couldn’t really dominate the world, without back-up on the ground, and now that’s gone, splintered –’
‘I told you,’ she hissed. ‘As much as I could in the time I had. “It’s too fast”, remember? Nanotech. With that you can build spaceships, not big dumb rockets but real ships so light and strong they can get to escape velocity like that.’ Her hand planed upwards. ‘Whoosh. They have AI that can guide laser-launchers, send ships up on a needle jet of super-heated steam. And with nanotech, you got one, you have as many as you want, you can grow them like trees!’
I shrugged, under the pouring water, absently sponging her skinny flanks.
‘If you have all that, you don’t need to rule the world. All you have to do is save it.’
Myra shook her head, sending drops flying. ‘They don’t want to save it, and they don’t think it wants to be saved. Oh, Jon, you hung out with all those humanists and anarchists, and you just don’t know how much bitterness and contempt there is among the scientific-technological elite for the ignorant masses! That’s why they threw me out, after the Fall Revolution, when I got in on a little bit of this and began to kick up a fuss. They called me a populist and a – a revisionist!’ She laughed. ‘They suffered and chafed for years under the UN bureaucrats and the Stasis cops and the Green saboteurs, and they don’t want to have to mess with those people ever again. They really believe that if news gets out of what they’re up to, the mobs will march on the labs, demagogues will push governments into another crackdown, and it’ll all be over.’
I looked up from flannelling her shins. ‘They could be right.’
‘Don’t say that! That’s what Reid’s been telling them for years!’
I stood up, almost slipping on the stall’s wet, sudded floor.
‘Reid?’
‘Ssshhh. Yes, I thought you knew. He’s running the whole show, and he’s been planning it for a long time. I think he might even have done it if the Revolution hadn’t happened, but now it has he’s moving faster than ever. Mutual Protection and its goddamn privatised gulags are the muscle behind it all, and he’s the worst of the lot. He thinks like you sometimes used to write, about freedom, but with him it’s absolute – no ethics, no politics. Even the scientists are afraid of him.’
I could believe that. Ever since he’d stopped being a communist, Reid had followed no interest but his own. So had I – being one’s brother’s keeper was to my mind still the original sin – but I’d never quite achieved Reid’s single-minded dedication in that regard.
The shower died to a trickle.
‘What are we going to do?’
Myra looked at me. ‘I know what I want to do,’ she said with a wicked smile. She looked down. ‘Jeez – does this this kinda talk turn you on?’
We dried each other silently in the tiny space that Myra’s big bed left in the