dear jon, it read, it’s too fast. help me. love, myra.
Then it crumbled to bits.
Well, that was a lot of use, I thought as I backed out and sat blinking in chill daylight, Annette’s quizzical smile teasing me from the other side of the table.
‘You’ve heard from Myra,’ she said.
I stared at her. ‘How do you know?’
‘From your face,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen that look before.’
I’d been in contact with Myra perhaps a score of times, in more than a score of years: when we’d had the Bomb, and on deals I’d brokered for the space movement in the Norlonto decades. There was a direct airship link between Alexandra Port and Baikonur, and I’d met her a few times when she was passing through, but most of our contact had been remote.
I reached for Annette’s hand. ‘You’re not jealous? Good God, it was seventy years ago!’
‘I know,’ Annette said. She squeezed my hand. ‘And I know you love me. But you loved her, too. I think she was the only other woman you were ever in love with. And it’s true what they say: love never dies. You can kill it, sure, but it never dies by itself.’
Her words may have echoed any number of sentimental songs and stories, but she spoke them as if they were a bitter, reluctantly accepted scientific truth. She laid a hand over my open mouth before I could protest, expostulate, explain.
‘It’s all right,’ she said. Then: ‘What does she want this time?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. I explained about the message, and where I’d found it. ‘She’s in some kind of trouble, and she wants me to help.’
‘“It’s too fast.”’ Annette stared past me, into some virtual reality of her own. ‘That fits, you know. The bonded labour, the profits from space – something is happening too fast. If you look at the news it’s like the world’s coming apart, and I think it’s…being pulled apart, by something we don’t know about.’
I laughed. ‘If it was, somebody would have told me.’
‘I think somebody just did,’ Annette said. ‘Anyway, there’s only one way to find out. Go to Kazakhstan. I assume it won’t be difficult to find Myra, or she’d have told you how.’
I looked at her, astonished. It was a proposal I was just working around to myself. From Annette I’d have expected, if anything, a fight against it.
‘I don’t want you to go,’ she said. ‘I don’t even know if you do. But I’m more afraid of doing nothing. Nobody’s spoken out for you since the troops came in. I don’t think they trust you any more.’
‘They?’
‘The space movement people. The comrades.’
‘There’s no conspiracy,’ I grinned. It was one of my catchphrases.
Annette’s eyes were sad and serious.
‘This time, you could be wrong,’ she said.
She stood up and moved to the house computer, keying the board in a brisk rattle. ‘Well come on,’ she said. ‘Go and help her. I’ll try and book you a flight. You get ready, and for heaven’s sake remember to pack your gun.’
I complied, shaking my head. None of the thoughts Annette had expressed had ever crossed my mind before. ‘Love never dies’.
Well, fuck me.
I was tempted to make the journey by one of the steadily plying airships, but as Annette pointed out those took days, and were usually loaded with freight and crowded with space-workers hung over after a month’s leave in Norlonto. So I found myself leaving Stanstead on a regular jet, much larger than the one that Reid and I had taken thirty years earlier. No anti-aircraft fire this time; the Urals corridor had long since been bombed into a safe passage.
Stanstead to Almaty, its airport still shell-pocked from the victory of the Kazakh People’s Front; north to Karaganda, a frightening, grimy place, black even in the snow: post-Soviet, post-industrial, post-independence, post-everything. From Karaganda there was a regular hop to Kapitsa; because the ISTWR was still an independent enclave, I was detained for a check – the first in my whole journey. Front cadres and local officials scrutinised my documents, tapped my details into some ancient mainframe (located in India, if the response time was anything to go by) then broke into smiles and offers of Johnny Walker Red Label when my records came up. I had said good things about the KPF, when it wasn’t fashionable. They insisted on telling me how much they admired this, and after a few whiskies I told them how much I admired them. They’d fought the US/UN, reunited their country without fueling nationalist fires, and refrained from imposing their state on the one part of the country that didn’t want it.
‘The ISTWR?’ They thought this was funny. They hadn’t refrained out of any high-flown principles.
‘Why not, then?’ I shrugged slightly, glanced at the map above the customs-officers’ desk. Not the little enclave’s defensive capacity, that was for sure.
‘Bad lands,’ I was told. ‘Bomb country.’
They say the steppe around Kapitsa glows in the dark, but it’s just starlight reflected off the snowfields. That’s what I told myself on the flight, as I dozed off the effects of good whisky taken neat, jolted awake and smoked and dozed again. Only two other seats on the aircraft were occupied, and their occupants were as keen to keep their own company as I was. I kept my reading-light off, pressed the side of my face to the window, and watched the black thread of the road from Karaganda to Semipalatinsk wend across the steppe, and even fancied I saw the tiny sparks of light from the snow-ploughs.
We landed in a twenty-below dawn on a runway just cleared of snow. A minibus hurried us to the terminal. Beyond the swept-up mounds of dirty snow the gantries stood skeletal and dark. Few aircraft were parked, none were coming in. The airport building was as bright as ever, its workers as secure in their casual employment as before, redundantly supervising busy machines. The republic’s heroes still loomed large in their posters.
But compared with its bustle when the place was exporting nuclear deterrence, it might as well have been deserted. Its sinister emptiness recalled the public squares of the old Communist capitals. I set off across the concourse with the nervous hesitation one feels on entering a large, old, and possibly unoccupied house.
I had no idea what to do next. If Myra had wanted to tell me, I’d assumed she would and could; if she’d had any warnings, she’d have included them in the message. As it stood it appeared that the only aspect of our contact which she wanted to keep secret was that she needed my help.
The coffee franchise was still there, and open. It was where she’d met us before. I walked over and ordered a coffee and sat down with it and a copy of the English-language edition of Kapitsa Pravda, which lived up to its name in that it gave an apparently truthful account of the news. I had reached the sports pages before I realised that it contained no news whatsoever about Kapitsa.
I scanned the concourse, eagerly fixing on any figure who chanced to resemble my memory of Myra, and sat back disappointed each time. An hour passed. Mutual Protection guards wandered through as if they owned the place. More people came and went. I heard one, then two more aircraft come in. Their passengers straggled individually or in small knots to the glass doors, outside which a dozen taxis idled their engines in the cold.
Maybe I should just look her up in the phone-book…I was standing at the booth and gazing at the search page before I realised that I didn’t know her current surname. It even took me several seconds of racking my memory before her original surname came back to me: Godwin. I tried that. No luck.