"They were bad before," said Otto. "Pollution, crime, alcoholism. The population has been nose-diving since the Soviet Union fell apart a hundred and fifty years ago."
Lehmann shook his head. "This is the product of slow decline. But it is nothing. It gets worse as we go further east. They say the purchase was a peaceful transaction, but we were not far off full-scale war. I was there, I fought in the Secret War."
Otto snorted.
"I didn't invent the name, Leutnant," said Lehmann irritably.
Novosibirsk's shiny station welcomed them in like a weary old brothel madame, decrepitude painted over with fresh make-up and a knowing smile. They stayed on the train as passengers came and went, the smart minions of the resource barons and oligarchs pouring from first-class carriages, rough-clothed people pouring in a long flood from the cheaper cars down the platform. Many, both rich and poor, wore biofilter masks, protection against the flu, yet another variant of which had ripped across Eurasia last winter.
The station was like the train, clean and hi-tech. A high wall ran around it. Money was finally coming back into the region, Chinese money. Valdaire reflected ruefully. Industrialisation wasn't a new dawn as the economists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries had thought, but a passing phase, jobs moving from region to region like ripples as the industrial revolution washed round the world, bringing prosperity, population expansion and finally collapse into poverty. The money went wherever the cheap labour was, and to think they once thought shopping could fill in once the factories had gone. Its only lasting legacy in places like this was overpopulation and environmental damage. Just like now, she thought, only we're more honest about it. They were idiots back then to think whatever benefits it brought would last.
The train filled up again. Armed men in the uniform dress of the Don Cossack Great Host made their way down the train and scanned their identities and travel documentation for the hundredth time since they'd boarded. Valdaire's 'ware was good, and their fake sigs held.
The train pulled away with a sigh, the thrum from its induction motors vibrating the carriages. Valdaire found the effect soporific, but did not sleep. She watched Novosibirsk slide by. Outside the city evidence of past environmental despoliation was everywhere, crumbling industrial complexes, weed-choked pits gouged out of the earth, the hulks of giant drag cranes rusting to pieces in their hearts. Some of these mines were active, giant automata worrying the soil with great steel teeth. Mountains stood with their tops lopped off, forests of trees black and dead around them. They rushed past trains loaded with lumber, ore and grain, all, like them, heading east; and everywhere the ideograms of the Orient. They were still hours away from the Sinosiberian demilitarised zone, but even this far west the influence of the People's Republic was apparent, the resources they took from the mountains and forests fuelling the ravenous economy of this second Chinese century.
Between ran mile upon mile of unbroken forest. Sometimes the remains of buildings could be seen poking out from among the trees, villages and towns cleared out by economic failure and flu. Russia was a broken empire, its hinterland abandoned to poverty while the plutoprinces of Moscow drowned in luxury. Elsewhere they travelled for hours through prairie fields, steppe land tilled by machine, not a human in sight.
As they travelled further east, the influence of the Chinese became more pronounced. Self-contained factories took the place of the abandoned relics, pod-like barracks of Han migrant workers incongruous in the forests and farmlands round them.
Lehmann had urged Otto to sleep, an activity he was reluctant to undertake, as Valdaire had discovered for herself. Chures stared out of the window. Lehmann pulled his seat into a reclining position and closed his eyes.
"Both of you are going to sleep?" said Valdaire.
"Yes," said Lehmann. "Kaplinski might well be on this train with us, but he'll not act. He would not find what we know, and if he managed to escape with his own skin intact, he'd be hunted. The Cossacks hate him. You not sleeping?"
Valdaire shook her head, and slipped Chloe's tablet out of its case.
"Suit yourself," said Lehmann. He was soon fast asleep. He snored.
Valdaire scanned the phone's screen. Through her she could see all the systems on the train; the interiors of all the cars, poor, rich and private, the long sweep of the roof, the front and rear major engines, the subsidiary drive units under each carriage. Nothing unusual.
Valdaire was tired. She looked at the sleeping faces of the two cyborgs. Lehmann was better-looking than Otto, and his English was less inflected, but there was something in his eyes that chilled her. You looked into Otto's eyes and behind the impassive glare there was a great deal of pain. In Lehmann it was something else: there was a lack, a hollowness that threatened to pull her in. So many killers in one place. Lehmann was all charm on the surface, but while Chures was penetrating and deliberately guarded, he had fire within him, he was human. Lehmann, she could not see what motivated him. Probably all he knew how to do was fight, and did so now from habit.
So where did that leave her? She was no cyborg, but she'd been a soldier too.
She decided she had better try and rest too. As her seat reclined and she closed her eyes, she wondered what the Ky-tech dreamt of, with all that tech crammed into their skulls. The thought kept her own sleep at bay for long minutes, until her mind surrendered to the swaying click of the train.
Otto's mentaug dreamed.
Clear notes rang out, silver trumpets in the dark.
The cave was cold, broad mouth open to the night; they weren't deep enough in to benefit from the warmth of the Earth, but the audience's eyes were bright with the rapture Christmas nights bring. There were a hundred of them or so, ranged up in three tiers above the brass band, their temporary stand erected where in summer tour guides stood.
The scene was from shortly after his initial implantation. His twin recollections struggled with the recreation. Human memory alters over time; that held in the storage crystals was absolute. There was a jagged line between them. The audience flickered, faces and clothing changed. Further irregularity was introduced by the mixing of his and Honour's memories. Shared e-membering in a full virtual environment was always an odd experience, but the melding of organic perceptions revealed just how subjective the world was. This shared environment led to a sensation of bilocation as his and Honour's individual memories ran into one another; Otto's twinned set — machine and meat — to Honour's native memory. They ran ever closer together, his brain checking its own recollections against those of Honour and his mentaug, green OK lights flickering through his iHUD.
"Oh Little Town of Bethlehem" finished with a fanfare. Honour's face was glowing in the candlelight. Otto felt his chest tighten. This moment was something no one else had, and that is why they had come back. No additional data was available to fill out the memory; soulcap and mentaug tech wasn't in wide usage then, and certainly no one beyond Otto in the cave had had any data capture device more sophisticated than a phone.
They needed a raw situation like this to know if it were the machine in Honour's head or Honour herself that ailed. Together their mentaugs rebuilt the scene totally; the present was out of reach. At the back of his head, Otto felt the machines checking over each other and their human hosts in concert, using their shared experience as a point of calibration.
A further factor in choosing this time was the emotional resonance the event had for both. They remembered it equally strongly, in their own way. As the music had swelled, Otto had known with all his heart that he loved this woman. A few weeks later they were engaged; months after that, married. Otto waited for the moment of realisation to arrive. Expected, it remained a shocking feeling, no less so for being a repetition.