The oblys council in Semipalatinsk—evidendy softened by intimidation or subversion—invited them in, and they cheerfully accepted the invitation. They rode in like liberators, welcomed by cheering crowds, and settled down with every appearance of being there to stay.
The red phone rang again.
“Chingiz Suleimanyov,” the caller identified himself. The current President of Kazakhstan; his nickname of “Genghis President” was not quite fair. “I have a proposal for your government, Madame Davidova, and for you personally…”
The following morning Myra got up and dressed, and packed. She had most of her luggage sent on to the airport. She loaded stacks of old files, in formats going back all the way through floppy disks to actual paper, into a couple of crates, sealed and diplomatic-bagged and sent off to another destination. Then she began stripping her flat, with a kind of rage at herself. She commandeered some kids from the militia to take the stuff down the stairs—physically, she wasn’t up to that, and she knew it.
The bedroom’s contents went first, all the cushions and throws, the tatting and trim, the lacework and lacquer and lapis lazuli—out, all of it, into big black plastic sacks that went straight to the nearest craft-market stall for a derisory sum. Let them make their own way again, let them travel the circuits like trade-goods, like cowrie shells and crated Marlboros, back to the Camden Locks and Greenwich Villages of the world. The posters on the walls went next, to another stall, for other collectors. The vinyl records and the compact discs—that was what they were called, she thought with a smile, as she hefted their stacked bulk—to a third.
And then the books. That did hurt, but she went on with it; grimly, grimily hauling them down from their shelves, sorting and stacking. Again and again tempted to sift, to stray; now and again lost in a book, or in the reminiscences it provoked. Blink, knuckle the eye, slam the covers shut, sneeze out the dust, move on. Her eyes reddened, her fingers blackened and her shoulders ached.
Most of the books, too, went to the bazaar. The remainder she had loaded in the back of a small truck. She washed herself and looked around the echoing emptiness of her flat. It was still habitable; it was a place to which she could return; but in it nothing of herself remained.
She shoved her 2045 Library of Congress and her other libraries and concert halls, art galleries and archives into the top of her overnight bag, and distributed her knives and pistols about her belts and pockets. The lads who’d lugged her stuff to the market came back one by one, with sheaves of money. She peeled off more than enough to pay them, one by one.
The truck with the books went ahead of her, well ahead, as she hefted her overnight bag and herself on to the horse, and rode out for the last time to the camp.
“Open up!”
Myra yelled, rattling the iron gate. The truck had parked itself in front, waiting with robotic patience for the obstacle to clear. Any electronic pleas it had made had evidently been ignored.
Myra could see why. There wasn’t much left of the camp but the fence, and away to one side—too far away to be useful for her—she could see men taking it apart with wire-cutters and rolling it up in great bales and wheels. Nothing but grass and roadway stretched ahead of her for a few hundred metres. Where the huts had been she could see only clumps of dark material on the steppe, with men and women wandering around and children racing about. The factories were not gone, but they were visibly shrivelling, as though their construction were being run in reverse.
She flipped down her eyeband, upped the gain, gazed at the scene. Nobody’d heard her shouts. Damn. She eased her old New Vietcong knock-off Glock from its holster, steadied and soothed the horse, and fired not into the air but carefully at a tussock a few tens of metres distant. The mare shied and the bullet ricocheted anyway, but the shot got the result she wanted. A figure detached itself from the milling crowd and marched towards her. Kim Nok-Yung, carrying a rifle.
“Hi, Myra.” He couldn’t stop smiling. He tapped a code into the lock’s plate. The gate creaked open, and he left it open. Myra led the horse through, and the truck followed, then kept pace beside her. Nok-Yung hopped on the running-board and hung on with one hand, flourishing the rifle triumphantly with the other, as if he was riding a tank into a liberated capital.
Isn’t this great!”
She got caught up in his enthusiasm.
“Yes, it’s wonderful. I’m so glad it’s over, Nok-Yung.”
They passed one of the factories, vanishing before their eyes, crumbling back from its edges into curiously ordered dust, dust that trickled like columns of ants along paths on the remaining machinery, or on the grass. Some of the dust heaped itself up into blocky stacks that hardened into colour-coded cubes, inert, from which the wind blew not a speck. Other lines of dust coalesced into glassy spheroids, obsidian-black or crystal-clear, that lay in the tall grass like gleaming pebbles and stones and boulders.
“Control components, computers and so on,” Nok-Yung indicated. “The cubes are construction material.”
“Will anyone collect them, I wonder?”
The Korean laughed. “We’ll take some of the control parts with us—they might be valuable, where we’re going.”
“Oh?”
He glanced sidelong at her, almost apologetic. “Semipalatinsk,” he said. “To the Sheenisov.”
Myra restrained herself from reining in the horse. “What? Why, for God’s sake?” She waved an arm, wildly, around and behind. “You can stay with us—you’re welcome here, in our republic or anywhere in Kazakhstan. Hey, man, Baikonur will take you on, think of that!”
He shook his head. “Some of the prisoners will setde here, of course. But I and Se-Ha and the others, we are going to the Sheenisov. Some of us have friends and family with them already. There is no other place for us. Even with Mutual Protection—” he turned aside and spat on the grass “—gone, we still have the debts, and the black-lists. No work to be had back home but debt-bondage. Among the Sheenisov we will be free.” He grinned, no longer apologetic but feral. “And there is work to be done there—work for us. They are the future.”
“But you don’t know anything about what they’re really like. Just because they call themselves communists doesn’t mean they’re nice—you should know that!”
Nok-Yung laughed harshly. “They have no Great Leader or Dear Leader, you can love it or leave it, and we’re going to try it.”
By this time they had reached the edge of the crowd. Myra reined in the horse and signalled the truck to stop. Nok-Yung jumped off the running-board. What had seemed from a distance like aimless wandering resolved itself into people moving about purposefully, retrieving and stacking their possessions from the self-disassembling huts. Most of them ignored her arrival. Myra was not surprised or put out. The benefits of her oversight were easy enough to overlook, and the camp committee itself was not a popular body among the prisoners, elected though it was. Like a company union, it had partially represented the interests of the labourers, while often enough relaying the will of the owners.
She noticed Shin Se-Ha, dapper in a sadly dated sarariman suit which he’d probably worn for the first and last time at his trial, but which for now signified his new freedom. He carried a small case through the scooting children and trudging adults. By now other vehicles and beasts were trundling or plodding into view, summoned by phones restored to their proper owners.