Perhaps if they had not, there would have been some other Corsican… but no. Chaos reigned, here as elsewhere.
At the green bridge over the Kelvin she paused, gazing down at the brown spate and white swirl. How trivial were the causes of the courses of any particle, any bubble on that flow. No, it was wilder than that, because the water was at least confined by its banks: it was more like how the whole course of a river could be deflected by a pebble, by a grain of sand, a blade of grass, at its first upwelling; where the great forces of gravity and erosion and all the rest did minute but momentous battle with the surface tension of a particular drop. History was a river where every drop was a potential new source, a foun-tainhead of future Amazons.
She walked on, past the salient of Kelvingrove Park on the left and up the steepening slope of Gibson Street, and turned to the right along the still tree-shaded avenue to the Institute. She rang the bell, smiling wryly at the polished brass of the name-plate. Once the Institute of Soviet and East European Studies, then of Russian and East European Studies, then…
The Institute for the Study of Post-Civilised Societies, was what they called it now.
The woman who opened the door looked very East European, in her size (small) and expression (suspicious). Her dark eyes widened slightly.
“Oh, it’s you,” she said. “Godwin.”
Tes, hello.” Myra stuck out her hand. The woman shook it, with brief reluctance, tugging Myra inside and closing the door at the same time.
“This place is watched,” she said. She had black bobbed hair; her age was hard to make out. Her clothes were as shabby as Myra’s: blue denim smock, black jeans grey at the knees. “My name is Irina Guzulescu. Pleased to meet you.”
They stood looking at each other in the narrow hallway. Institutional linoleum, grey paint and green trim, black stairway. The place smelt of old paper and cigarette smoke. Posters—shiny repro or faded original—from the Soviet Union and the Former Union: Lenin, Stalin, Gorbachev, Antonov, solemn; Gagarin, smiling. The Yeltsingrad Siege: heroic child partisans aiming their Stingers at the Pamyat Zeppelins. The building was completely silent and there was nobody else around.
“I was kind of expecting more people here,” Myra said. “I left a message.”
“Like I said.”
“Oh.” Myra felt baffled and miffed.
“Your cases arrived safely,” Irina said, as though to mollify her. She escorted her up the narrow black-bannistered stairs to the library. The stair carpet was frayed to the point of criminal negligence. The library itself was cramped, a maze of bookcases through which one had to go crabwise. Several generations of information technology were carefully racked above the reading-table. Myra’s crates were stacked beside it.
TU leave you to it,” Irina said.
Thanks.”
Myra, alone, pulled down her eyeband, upped the gain, looked down at the crates and sighed. They were still bound with metal tape. She clicked her old Leatherman out of its pouch and got to work opening them, coiling the treacherously sharp bands carefully into a waste-paper basket. Then she had to pull the nails, like teeth. Finally she was able to get the files out.
She sorted the paper files into stacks: her personal stuff—diaries and letters and so on—and political, sorted by time and organization, all the way back from her ISTWR years through to internal factional documents from that New York SWP branch in the 1970s. These last still made her smile: had there really ever been anyone daft enough to choose as his nomme de guerre for a debate about the armed struggle “Dr Ahmed Estraguel”?
She worked her way, similarly, through the formats and conversions from Dissembler through DoorWays to Linux to Windows to DOS, and through storage media from the optical disks and bubble-magnetic wafers and CD-RWs (’CD-Rubs’, they used to be called) to the floppy disks, almost jumping out of her seat at the noise the ancient PC made when it took the first of those. In the quiet building, it sounded like a washing-machine on the spin cycle.
After about an hour and a half, which passed in a kind of trance, all her optical and electronic files were copied to the Institute’s electronic archive. She blinked up her eyeband menu, and invoked Parvus.
“Hi,” she said.
“Hello,” he said.
She felt almost awkward. “Do you mind having a copy taken, and its being downloaded?”
The entity laughed. “Mind? Of course not! Why should I mind?”
“OK,” Myra said. She uncoiled a fibre-optic cable from the terminal port and socketed it to her eye-band. “I want your copy to guard this collection of files—” she ran her highlighting finger over it “—and anything you’ve got with you right now, applying the kind of discretionary access criteria that your existing parameters permit. Give the scaling a half-life of, oh, fifty years. Got that?”
“Yes.” Parvus smiled, doubled, then one of him disappeared dramatically like a cartoon genie swooshing back into a bottle.
“Done,” he said. It had taken longer than she’d expected—she must have had more files on her personal datadeck than she’d realised.
“Thank you,” said Myra. “Anything to report, by the way?”
Parvus shrugged expansively. “Nothing that can’t wait. Except that Glasgow Airport is closed.”
“What?”
Surely not a coup, not here—
“Fighting on the perimeter. Damage to the runways. Just Green partisans, nothing serious, but there’s no chance you’ll get your flight on Monday.”
“Oh, shit. Book me a train. For tomorrow, OK? Catch you later.”
She disengaged the cable link and let it roll back. Then she got to work labelling the stacks, dating the paper folders and making notes for the Institute’s archivist.
Somebody clattered up the stairs, strode into the library and flicked the light on. Myra turned around sharply and met the surprised gaze of the girl who’d identified her at the demo.
“Oh!” said the girl. She slowly slid her tartan scarf from around her neck and flicked her long, thick black hair out from under her denim jacket’s collar. “What—what are you doing here?”
Myra straightened up, feeling irrationally pleased that she was marginally taller than the younger woman.
“I was about to ask you the same question,” she said.
“I work here! I’m a post-grad student.”
She said it with such confusion of face, such a widening of her big brown eyes, that Myra couldn’t help but smile.
“And a political activist, too, I understand.”
The girl nodded firmly. “Aye.” The comment seemed to have allowed her self-confidence to recover. She stepped over to a chair and sat, stretching her legs out and propping her boots on a book-caddy. Myra observed this elaborately casual behaviour with detached amusement.
“I was an activist myself, when I studied here,” Myra said, half-sitting on the edge of the table.
“I know,” the girl said coldly. “I’ve read your thesis. Detente and Crisis in the Soviet Economy.”
Myra smiled. “It still stands up pretty well, I think.”
Teah. Can’t say the same about your politics, though.” She frowned, swinging her feet back to the floor and leaning forward. “In a way it’s nothing… personal, you understand? I mean, when I read what you wrote, I like the person who wrote it. What I can’t do is square that with what you’ve become.”
That was laying it on the line! Myra felt a jolt of pain and guilt.
“I don’t know if I can, either,” she said. “I changed. Real politics is more complicated than—ah, fuck it. Look—uh, what’s your name?”
“Menial MacClafferty.”