She sat down again. “Who else is looking? If you’re about to give me a briefing, wouldn’t VR be better?”
Jason waved his hands and looked around. Tourists and soldiers and locals ambled along the noonday street. “Nobody’s looking.” He combed his fingers through his hair. “And you’ll have noticed, I don’t have an eyeband.” He shrugged. “All the networks are compromised anyway, have been for years. That’s why I listen to the radio, and read newspapers, and write in a notebook, and carry paper maps.”
“Fair enough,” said Myra, lightly, to hide her cold shock at what he’d just said. Then she realised she couldn’t let it pass. “What do you mean, ‘compromised’?”
“Insecure, no matter what you do. Codes, hiding the real message in the junk, whatever—there are systems that’ll crack every new variant as soon as you set it up. Quantum computation killed cryptography, and there are better methods than that now, implemented on things nobody understands. They’re out there, Myra. I’ve seen them.”
She smiled sceptically. Things that man was not meant to know?”
Jason nodded vigorously. Yes, that’s it exactly!” he said, as though he’d never heard the expression before. Perhaps he hadn’t. The youth of today. He looked down again at the map, dismissing the subject with a twirl of his hand. Myra let it drop too, but she didn’t dismiss it. She was pretty sure he was mistaken, or lying, or had been lied to. And in whose interest might it be for her to distrust her ’ware?
Hah.
Jason jabbed a forefinger on North America, ran it around the Great Lakes and partway down the Eastern seaboard. “OK, here’s my country, was yours. The United States, as we still call ourselves. Not exactly ‘sea to shining sea’ any more. ‘From St Lawrence to the Keys’ never quite caught on, and even that’s hard to hold. I mean, we need Maine between us and the Canadian hordes, but, shit. We’re holding down major insurgencies everywhere between Baltimore and Jacksonville. And the only reason we hang on to Florida is for Canaveral, frankly, and the only reason they stay with us is they’re scared of El Barbudo.” He glanced up under his brows, cast her a wry smile. “You should hear the old boys at Langley kicking themselves about that one. After the Pike Commission put a stop to the exploding cigar capers they just thought fuck it, the bastard’s gotta die sometime. Not.”
He opened his fingers like dividers and straddled the continent. “West Coast…” He sighed. “La-la Land. They got a rival claim in to be the successor state, so diplomatically we don’t get on, but between you and me and the gargon here—” he absently waved his other hand, snapped fingers, pointed to their glasses “—we’re the best of friends.” He brought the heel of his palm down on the middle of America, masking off a large area between the Appalachians and the Rockies. “Compared with how we get on with the rest. The Mormons, the militias, the fundies, the White Right, the Indians—name it, we lost to it.”
“Yeah, well,” Myra said. “I had heard.”
“Lucky for us,” he went on, “they’re a bit down on scientists. They got oil and minerals, all right, but with Flood Geology they won’t find much more of it. This ain’t rocket science. Speaking of which, we and our La-la friends got all the aerospace and comp sci and nuke tech experts. At least, we got the ones who didn’t die trying to convince some hick inquisitor with a mains supply and a jump-lead that they really, really didn’t know where the alien bodies were buried. Or where the crashed saucers were stashed.”
“You’re kidding.”
“I wish. Turned out more people believed in the UFO cover-up than ever believed in the Jewish bankers. When they got their hands on some of yer actual eevill guvmint scientists… you can imagine the fun they had.” He had a thousand-yard stare, past her, for a moment. “Some of the scientists confessed. In astonishing detail. Names, dates, places, A-to-Z files.”
The kid serving tables put down another couple of bottles. Myra smiled at him, shoved him a few greasy gigalira notes, waved a cigarette at Jason.
“Any of it true?” She laughed uneasily. “I’ve sometimes wondered, like about the diamond ships…”
Jason blinked, shook his head. “Oh, no. Total corroborative hallucination. Like alien abductions, or witches’ sabbats. They’d heard the stories too, see?
Hell, maybe some even believed it themselves, who’s to say. The diamond ships, nah, that was just black tech from way back. Your basic Nazi flying saucer. Neat idea in principle, but it never was practical until the right materials came on-stream with the carbon assembler.”
Myra leaned back, refilling her glass, wishing she could consult Parvus. “You’re telling me,” she said, “that East America has border security problems too? Well, let me put your mind at rest. We’re not about to embarrass you by asking for ground troops. Or even teletroopers.”
“God, if it was that…” Jason had the long gaze again. “No, it’s a bit more complicated. You’re going to Ankara next, right?”
“What?”
“You’re going to ask the Turks for ground troops.”
“I don’t know where you got that idea,” Myra said, carefully not denying it. Ankara wasn’t on her itinerary at all, but she was very curious to know why Jason thought it was, and what bothered him about it.
“Sources,” Jason said. “Anyway, that’s what I’m here to tell you would be a very bad idea. If you want to get any help from the US, that is.”
“Hmm,” said Myra. She glanced at a soldier trawling a souvenir rack a few metres away. “I’m just looking at a US-made GI uniform, US KevlarPlus body armour, a US Robotics head-up with Raytheon AI, a US Colt Carbine-14…”
“Yeah-yeah-yeah,” said Jason impatiently. “Valued customers. Old friends. Doesn’t mean we’d be happy to see their standard-issue US Army boots tramping all over Central Asia.”
“Even to stamp on the Sheenisov?”
Jason leaned his elbows on the table, steepled his hands in front of his face to mask his mouth, and spoke quiedy.
“Look, Myra, these ain’t communism’s glory days. I mean, in our glory days we’d have been pounding them with B-52s round the clock, for all the good that would have done. I understand your, ah, fraternal allies have tried that in their own inimitable way, with Antonovs. I’ve been authorised to let you know—off the record, and deniably—that if you come to New York or DC you’ll be welcome, and your requests will be listened to sympathetically. But. Our threat assessment of the Sheenisov—where the fuck did that name come from?—is pretty low-key. If a motorised horde of Mongols in plastic yurts want to plan their economy with steam-driven computers, that’s their problem, and if it turns out to be popular in your country, that’s yours.”
Myra stared at him, rocked back. “Jeez. That’s me told.”
“Hey, nothing personal. It had to be me—or someone like me—who told you this, because at the level you’re gonna be dealing with in NY or DC it’d be… undiplomatic and impolitic to put it to you so bluntly. I’m not saying you won’t get anything. You will, just—maybe not as much as you’d like.”
She narrowed her eyes, leaning forward again. He looked so straightforward, so frank. He couldn’t know about the nuclear card up her sleeve.
“OK, OK,” she said, as though not too bothered, which she wasn’t. “So, you’re more worried about the Turkish Federation expanding than you are about the SSU?”
“You got it. And, well, there are bigger concerns than that. The coup attempt has—let’s say it hasn’t made things easier for us.”
“How?”
Jason compressed his lips. “You’ll find out,” he said gloomily.