“What can I do for you, Myra?”
Tell me what you think of the General.” She wasn’t bothered by appearing to talk to empty air; she wasn’t the only person in that cafe area consulting a familiar or a fetch.
“That is a tricky one,” said Parvus. He ran his fingers through his thatch, rummaged in his crumpled jacket for cigarettes. Lit up and relaxed; the addictive personality was part of the package, an aspect of how the thing hung together. “There are of course rumours —” dismissive smoketrail “—that the FI has long had access to a rogue AI. Or the other way round, according to its opponents.” Parvus showed his teeth. “It goes back to when AIs of that sophistication were rare—before the Revolution, or the Singularity.”
“This is the Singularity?” It was Myra’s turn to wave a cigarette. “Not like you’d notice.”
“It’s one of these things you don’t notice, when you’re in the middle of it,” agreed Parvus. “Like the mass extinction event that’s going on around us right now.”
“But that’s slow, that’s the point. The Singularity’s supposed to be fast on something more than a geological scale.”
“It was.”
“Oh.” She wasn’t sure she wanted to take this discussion any further. “Anyway, back to the General, and what you make of him.”
“Ah, yes. Well. Very dangerous, in my opinion. His use of face and voice is remarkably effective at getting under the skin of… people with skin. Count yourself lucky he can’t use pheromones, at least not over the net.”
“You’re impervious to his charm yourself, I take it.”
“Yes,” Parvus sighed. “Fortunately for me, I lack self-awareness.”
Myra was still gaping at her familiar’s unexpected remark—surely ironic, though she wasn’t sure on what level—when Parvus’s place was occupied by a Kazakh man with smooth clothes and a lined face. He had a distracting small child in tow, and a silently accusing puffy-eyed woman behind him. The woman took another chair, held the squirming toddler in her lap.
Myra blinked Parvus out of her sight, vaguely hoping that the AI wasn’t offended, raised her eyeband and smiled at the man and his family. His returning smile was forced.
“Good morning, Madame President. Why are you leaving us?”
Myra looked around. Nobody else seemed to have noticed her. The cult of personality was another strategic omission from their socialist democracy. Just as well—she didn’t want to be mobbed on her departure. “I’m not leaving you,” she said earnestly, leaning forward and speaking as though confidentially. Her mission had not yet been publicly announced, but she had no objection to starting a truthful rumour in advance. Only the details were sensitive, and at that level secrecy was pointless—she was confident that her full itinerary was already circulating the nets, buried among hundreds of spurious versions, all of equally authoritative provenance. I’m going to the West, to get help. Economic and military assistance.”
The man looked sceptical. “Against the Sheenisov? But we haven’t a chance, against them. We have no defensible borders.”
“No, but Kazakhstan has—and it’s on behalf of Kazakhstan that I’m going.”
Tor Chingiz?” The man’s face brightened; he glanced at his wife, as though to cheer her up. “So we are going to drive the Reds out of Semey?”
“We can’t bomb Semey,” Myra said, repeating exactly President Suleimanyov’s words to her. “But we can hold the pass east of Lake Zaysan, and we can stop any further advance in the north-east. If we get help soon. The SSU forces are unlikely to try anything for some weeks, because they’re stretched. And they don’t like frontal fighting. As long as the Kazakhstani Republic stays hostile to them, they won’t come in.” She grinned encouragingly. “And I can be sure our own republic will stay hostile.”
She was not sure at all. There was enough social discontent, understandable enough, in her redundant workers’ state for the Sino-Soviets to work on. No doubt the first agitators were already drifting in, among the first refugees from Semipalatinsk. But the man took her words to heart.
Tes,” he said, adding, “if Allah wills. But we are leaving, with all we have.”
“I can’t blame you,” Myra said. T wish you well. I hope you see your way clear to come back, when things are more… settled.”
“Perhaps.” The man shrugged, the woman smiled thinly, the child suddenly bawled. They departed, looking up disconsolately at the screens, leaving Myra depressed.
The man had looked like a small trader, one of the large middle class raised by the republic’s mixed economy. Despite all the devils it painted on its walls, the ISTWR had always stood more for a permanent NEP than a permanent revolution: only its defence and space industries were state-owned, and apart from the welfare system everything else (which in GNP terms didn’t add up to much, she had to admit) was more or less laissez-faire. She wondered what the family had to fear from the Sheenisov, who by all accounts would have left their property and piety alone. In a way it was not surprising: the Sheenisov had made their advances by bluff and intimidation, by looking and sounding more radical and communistic than they actually were, and their absence from the comms net left a great blank screen for the most sinister speculations to play on. So perhaps this kind of unwarranted fear was the price of their progress.
Well, she would make them pay a higher price, in a harder currency. She drained her coffee and headed for the departure lounge.
At Almaty she picked up her documents, diplomatic passport and line-of-credit card in a snazzy Samsonite Diplock handed over by a courier, and on the flight to Izmir she sifted through them. The papers were literally for her eyes only, being coated with a polarising film tuned to her eyeband which in turn was tuned to her. Even so, and even sitting in the company class section at the front of the jet, alone apart from the flight-attendant, Myra felt the impulse to hunch over the papers, and wrap her wrist and elbow around their corners like a kid in class trying not to be copycatted.
Suleimanyov had struck a bold deal with the ISTWR, and with her. It was a deal which had been proposed by Georgi Davidov, who’d died before he’d been ready to return with it. Myra’s lips tightened whenever she thought of that; her suspicions stirred and were not soothed back to sleep. He’d had the contracts drawn up in the briefcase that was found with his body in the hotel room. The terms were simple, a straightforward offer of economic union and military alliance. Kazakhstan would take over the ISTWR’s residual social responsibilities, assimilating all of its inhabitants who wished to become Kazakhstani citizens, subsidising the rest. It would provide for the smaller state’s conventional defence, leaving to its People’s Army and Workers’ Militia the only functions for which they were actually fitted—internal security and border patrols, principally the guarding of the spaceport and airport. In return, Myra’s government would integrate its space-borne weapons, including the nukes, into the greater republic’s defence forces. They would retain ultimate operational control—there was no way Suleimanyov could expect them to surrender that—but for all public and diplomatic and military purposes, they’d work together under one command. At a stroke Kazakhstan would have a military force commensurate with its land area rather than its population.
This new Great Power could then negotiate assistance from the West. It could stand as a solid bulwark—possibly even an entering wedge—against the Sheenisov, which the inchoate regimes of the Former Union and warlorded China could not. The nuclear weapons would be their bargaining counter. Useless themselves—in any but the shortest term—against the Sheenisov, they could be made available to the US or UN in exchange for the hardware and orbital back-up and even, at the outside, troop deployments that could hold back this new Red tide.