I shrugged, under the pouring water, absently sponging her skinny flanks.
‘If you have all that, you don’t need to rule the world. All you have to do is save it.’
Myra shook her head, sending drops flying. ‘They don’t want to save it, and they don’t think it wants to be saved. Oh, Jon, you hung out with all those humanists and anarchists, and you just don’t know how much bitterness and contempt there is among the scientific-technological elite for the ignorant masses! That’s why they threw me out, after the Fall Revolution, when I got in on a little bit of this and began to kick up a fuss. They called me a populist and a – a revisionist!’ She laughed. ‘They suffered and chafed for years under the UN bureaucrats and the Stasis cops and the Green saboteurs, and they don’t want to have to mess with those people ever again. They really believe that if news gets out of what they’re up to, the mobs will march on the labs, demagogues will push governments into another crackdown, and it’ll all be over.’
I looked up from flannelling her shins. ‘They could be right.’
‘Don’t say that! That’s what Reid’s been telling them for years!’
I stood up, almost slipping on the stall’s wet, sudded floor.
‘Reid?’
‘Ssshhh. Yes, I thought you knew. He’s running the whole show, and he’s been planning it for a long time. I think he might even have done it if the Revolution hadn’t happened, but now it has he’s moving faster than ever. Mutual Protection and its goddamn privatised gulags are the muscle behind it all, and he’s the worst of the lot. He thinks like you sometimes used to write, about freedom, but with him it’s absolute – no ethics, no politics. Even the scientists are afraid of him.’
I could believe that. Ever since he’d stopped being a communist, Reid had followed no interest but his own. So had I – being one’s brother’s keeper was to my mind still the original sin – but I’d never quite achieved Reid’s single-minded dedication in that regard.
The shower died to a trickle.
‘What are we going to do?’
Myra looked at me. ‘I know what I want to do,’ she said with a wicked smile. She looked down. ‘Jeez – does this this kinda talk turn you on?’
We dried each other silently in the tiny space that Myra’s big bed left in the room, and continued the conversation under cover of the bedding and some very loud music. She told me what we were going to do, and then we did it, and then lay on our sides, face-to-face, legs entwined, talking dirty politics. We whispered under the bed-clothes, like children after lights-out.
Simply exposing what was going on might well result in the very outcome that Reid’s faction feared. Letting it go on could result in a chaotic and bloody splitting of humanity, between a tiny space-based minority and an earthbound majority dominated in all probability by anti-technological, paranoid leaderships. Either way, the prospects for a civilised future were dim.
There was another way, Myra argued: to get what she called the ‘legitimate’ space movement to organise a campaign for exactly the same things as Reid’s group wanted – access to the technology developed by the UN and the scientific underground, a big effort to hold the space programme together – but openly, and voluntarily, funded by donation rather than extortion. Get it all out in the open, and discussed. That was the only way to undermine the suspicions on both sides: let the technologists see that people really wanted what they could give, and that they would actually pay for it. Let the ordinary folk see that deep technology wasn’t really going to turn the biosphere into germ-sized robots or them into machines, and all the other things they’d been told they had to fear.
‘And you,’ she said, ‘are the only person I know of who could make it work.’
‘Me? You flatter me, lady.’
‘You have the contacts, the credibility…’
‘I’m not too popular with the space-movement cadre any more,’ I said. ‘To tell you the truth, I think most of them already think the way you say Reid’s group does.’
And (I didn’t say) there was only one thing that could turn the supporters of the movement against its organisers, and that was exposing the plot, if such it was. I lay in the dark tent of the quilt for another minute, looking at Myra’s face, and thinking some thoughts which I hoped didn’t show on mine. Starting with the big one: she had told me a pack of lies.
‘Let’s do lunch,’ I said.
Lunch was in a tiny Greek restaurant around the corner.
‘Why Greeks?’ I asked, nibbling hot shish.
‘They followed the Tatars back here, before the Tatars went home,’ Myra explained.
‘That’s a lot of history,’ I suggested.
‘Yeah,’ said Myra. She glanced around. ‘Leave it.’
We drank good wine and some ferocious brandy. Myra talked about safe, non-controversial subjects, like how the whole state of the world was my fault.
‘If you’d sold the Germans the option,’ Myra explained, ‘the fucking Israel is –’ (it was always that with Myra, like one word) ‘– would never have dared do what they did, and the Yanks would never have taken over, and…’
‘And so on.’ I laughed. ‘Come on. There must have been scores of people in the same position as me, who made the same decision.’
‘Yeah, but they all needed their nukes. You didn’t. You just hung onto them out of principle.’
‘No I didn’t! I’ve never made a principled decision in my life! I’m an opportunist and proud of it. Anyway, why didn’t you just let them have their deterrent, and settle up afterwards?’
Myra grinned at me, shrugged.
‘Bad for business.’
I grinned back at her.
‘That was my reason, too.’
We’d reached the honey-cake and coffee and the last shots of brandy. Myra picked and licked and sipped. Stopped, a grin of enlightenment on her face.
‘That’s it!’ she said. ‘I should know better than to blame individuals. The whole goddamn’ mess is the fault of –’
‘Capitalism!’ I said loudly, and the garson came over with the bill.
Back at her flat we dived into bed again. She left the sound-system on. We hardly noticed when the rock music changed to military music, but we both lay in silence afterward, when the announcement that the airport was temporarily closed boomed through the house.
We didn’t need to talk about what this meant. Martial music and closed airports were the traditional prelude to an announcement that the country had been saved. Someone had made their move. It was time I did likewise, before the roadblocks went up – or Myra turned me in, for her own protection and mine.
I stroked a strand of hair away from her face.
‘Are you ready for a cigarette?’ I smiled.
‘God, yes.’
‘I’ve got some in my jacket,’ I said, sitting up and reaching toward the end of the bed.
‘No, no,’ Myra said. She threw back the covers, caught my forearm. ‘You must try some of ours. Really.’
She smiled into my eyes. Had she thought I might be going for my gun? If so, she must think it was still in the jacket. She’d have felt it there when we embraced in the hall, and not checked again before getting in the shower.
She reached over to a bedside cabinet, opened the drawer. I didn’t take my eyes off her for a second, and she didn’t let go of my arm, as she fumbled around inside the drawer and took out a pack of cigarettes. We smoked in thoughtful silence. The strong, rough cigarette made my head buzz. Did she suspect that I suspected?