My mother frowned at him.
‘But it’s all right,’ my father hastened to add, as he stood up and shook out his napkin and folded his paper. ‘The workers won’t let them use the bombs. We’ll stop them, won’t we?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘We’ll stop them.’
I knew from playing with other boys in the street that my parents’ views were not widely held in Streatham, but I also knew that all around the world, even in far-away countries like Austria and New Zealand, there were people who agreed with them. Altogether there were hundreds and hundreds of them.
This mighty force would stop the bomb. I went back to playing happily with my rocket, and my father went whistling off to catch the train that carried the wage-slaves to work.
‘Reid told me he had a surprise,’ I babbled, ‘but I must say I’m knocked flat. How on earth did you end up here?’
Myra smirked. She looked well, and I could almost believe she hadn’t aged much in forty years, but that was just part of the same illusion that kept me from feeling old myself. You could see the papery texture of her skin, the crinkles in its still impressive tightness.
‘I came here in the ’nineties,’ she explained, ‘to do research, and then I just realised that these people needed help and that I enjoyed giving it. They still had a lot of bad shit from the tests, and they had one hell of a brain-drain as well. They needed any educated person they could get, and I was able to fix a lot of aid from US medical charities. Then I fell for an army officer, we got married, and luckily for us he was on the winning side of several civil wars and military coups and the re-revolution. So here I am, People’s Commissar for Social Policy.’ She waved a hand. ‘They let me sign treaties whenever I want, so I don’t feel like I’m stuck with the domestic issues.’ She laughed. ‘You know, women’s work!’
I shook my head. ‘So Reid’s become a capitalist, and you’ve become a bureaucrat – dammit, I’m the only one who’s still a revolutionary!’
‘I am not a bureaucrat,’ Myra said, with some hauteur. ‘I was elected, in a real election. We do have democracy, you know.’
Reid was taking documents from his briefcase and spreading them on the table. ‘Yes Myra, you sure won over your dashing young lieutenant. His faction has given a whole new meaning to the expression “deformed workers’ state”.’
‘Old joke,’ Myra said, but I could see she wasn’t annoyed. ‘I’ll tell you an older one. Soviet. “How do we know Marxism is a philosophy? Because if it was a science, they’d have tried it out first on dogs.”’
There was such withering proletarian contempt in her voice that we all had to laugh, and then Myra shot back: ‘Well comrades, these people were the dogs, and they’ve made something work. I wish you could stay for a few days and see it. Or even come and visit in October.’
‘Why October?’
‘Centenary celebrations,’ Myra said. ‘We’re planning a real impressive fireworks display.’
‘I’ll bet,’ Reid said dryly. ‘The biggest in the world, no doubt. Unfortunately, we have our own revolution to get back to.’
Myra sighed. ‘Business…You ready with those forms?’
‘Ready when you are.’
We signed, flashbulbs popped, and that was it. The world would know that I had the Bomb.
When the Soviet Union broke up, Kazakhstan had for a while found itself playing the unfamiliar role of a Great Power, because it had on its territory a number of nuclear weapons. When Kazakhstan broke up, one of its fragments had retained some (different, and better) nuclear weapons, with the additional difference that the International Scientific and Technical Workers’ Republic – initially nothing more than a division of the ex-Soviet Rocket Forces, a few thousand nuked-upon Kazakhs and a strip of steppe – had known what to do with them.
They exported nuclear deterrence. Not the weapons themselves – that, perish the thought, would have been illegal – but the salutary effect of possessing them. Our contract was pretty standard, and it simply gave us an option to call in a nuclear strike on anyone who used nuclear weapons against us, and who didn’t provide full compensation. Anyone who nuked us – even accidentally or incidentally – had to pay up or get nuked themselves.
The beauty of this arrangement was that any number of clients – the more the better – could have a claim on a relatively small number of nukes, an effect rather like fractional reserve banking. It also meant that anyone who wanted to tempt the ISTWR with a first-use deal would have had to offer more than the income from all the deterrent clients, and that would have cost far more than just building or stealing their own nukes. So the chances of the system being used for nuclear aggression were minute. Above all, for the first time, nuclear deterrence was available to anyone willing to pay for it, and the cost was reasonable enough for every homeland to have one.
Especially when the competion caught on: rogue submarine commanders, missile crews in Siberia and Alaska who wanted payment in real money for a change, groups of ambitious junior officers in Africa all started selling off shares in the family plutonium.
Another triumph for the free market.
Not everyone agreed.
‘When I saw the pictures,’ Annette raged, ‘of you with that anorexic floozy, I thought you’d run off with her! This is worse!’
Oh, no it ain’t, I thought, and I was right. We quarrelled, we argued, we got over it. This was just ideas, not bodies. I could be an actual instead of a potential mass murderer, and it would have hurt her less than me screwing somebody else.
Not that I ever said it. Some weapons are best kept in reserve.
11
Down Time
Wilde stood looking dubiously at the pack and the two sets of weapons that Tamara had laid out on the table. He lifted the pack and put it back down again.
‘What have you got in there?’ he said. ‘Nukes?’
Tamara looked up from a scanner, which she was using to download the latest maps of the Fifth Quarter to her contacts, and shook her head. ‘No nukes,’ she said firmly. ‘Discharging nuclear explosives within city limits is a serious offence.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Wilde. ‘So that’s us ready to go, then.’
‘More or less.’ Tamara folded away the scanner. ‘We need to be ready to go at any time, but that doesn’t mean we have to go now. Reid will book the hearing, and we’ll get at least thirteen hours’ notice.’
‘What about preparing our case?’ Wilde asked. ‘I don’t know anything about your laws here, let alone the specific code Talgarth operates.’
‘Oh, that’s all right,’ Tamara said. ‘Invisible Hand will take care of it. You can get someone to stand counsel if you want, but if you ask me you’re just as well letting Invisible Hand patch you a MacKenzie remote.’
‘A what?’
‘A software agent to advise you on points of law, when you’re representing yourself.’
‘Ah,’ said Wilde. ‘Progress.’
Tamara wandered over to the kitchen-range and began brewing up a large canteen of coffee.
‘Expecting company?’
‘Allies,’ Tamara said. ‘Invisible Hand is calling some in for me.’ She smiled mischievously at him. ‘None for you.’
‘Consider me one of yours,’ Wilde said. He looked about the room, searching. ‘Do you have any way of keeping up on the news?’
Tamara looked at him oddly. ‘Yeah, sure.’
She went over to a shelf and picked up a television screen and unrolled it and stuck it to the wall behind the table. The tall kettle was boiling. She turned to attend to it. Wilde looked at the screen, caught Tamara’s eye. He waved at the screen’s blank pewter surface.