Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

centuries’
worth of classics and bestsellers and blockbusters and textbooks,
as if blown from the four winds and fetched up against these
barriers. It would have been the same in any of the huts. The
next most common items of clutter were musical instruments and
craft equipment and products: plastic scrimshank, spaceships in
bottles, elaborately carved wooden toys.
    As they sat down around a table Myra felt prickly and on edge.
She tugged her eyeband, a half-centimetre-wide crescent of
translucent plastic, from her hair and placed it across her
temples, in front of her eyes. A message drifted across her
retina. ‘Nanoprotect56 has detected the following known
surveillance molecules in the room: Dataphage, Hackendice,
Reportback, Mercury, Moldavian. Do you wish to clean
up?’
    She blinked when the cursor stopped on the Proceed option,
took a deep breath, held it until her lungs were burning, then
exhaled. The faces around the table were incurious and
amused.
    ‘Cleanup in progress,’ the retinal display
reported. Myra took a deep breath. It felt cool this time, as
well as smooth.
    ‘So we have privacy,’ one of the Koreans said,
with heavy irony.
    ‘Ah, fuck it,’ Myra said. ‘Happens every
time. You gotta assume they’re listening.’ There was
bound to be something else her current release of ‘ware
wasn’t up to catching: she imagined some tiny Turing
machine ticking away, stitching sound-vibrations into a
long-chain molecule in the dirt She took a recorder –
larger and less advanced than the one in her mental picture
– from her pocket and laid it on the table. ‘And
I’m listening. So, what have you got for me?’
    A quick exchange of glances around the table ended as usual
with Kim Nok-Yung accepted as the spokesman. He rustled a paper
from an inner pocket and ran a finger down the minutes; Matters
Arising started with the routine first question.
    ‘Any progress on POW recognition?’
    Myra was touched by the note of hope with which he asked the
question, the hundredth time no different from the first. She
compressed her lips and shook her head. ‘Sorry, guys. Red
Cross and Crescent are working on it, and Amnesty. Still no
dice.’
    Nok-Yung shrugged. ‘Oh well. Please make the standard
protest.’
    ‘Of course.’
    As they ticked their way down the list of complaints and
conditions and assignments and payments, Myra noticed that the
whole pattern ofproduction in the camp had changed. The intensity
of the work, and the volume of output, had gone up drastically.
Twenty engines and a hundred habitat modules completed for Space
Merchants in the past month! Nok-Yung and Se-Ha were subtly
underlining the changes with guarded glances and shifts in tone,
but they weren’t commenting explicitly.
    Myra looked around the table when they reached the end of the
agenda. No one had complained about the speed-up. They
didn’t seem troubled; they had an air of suppressed
excitement, almost glee, as they waited for her to speak. She
checked over again the figures in her head, and realised with a
jolt that at this rate most of the men here would work off their
fines – or ‘debts’ – in months rather
than years.
    Another endgame move. Myra nodded slightly and smiled.
‘Well, that’s it,’ she said. ‘Don’t
overwork yourselves, guys. I mean it. Make sure you get in plenty
of road-mending, OK?’
    The prisoners just grinned at their shared secret She reached
for the saddlebags, as though just remembering something.
‘I’ve brought some books for you.’
    The men leaned inward eagerly as she unpacked. They
weren’t allowed any kind of interface with the net, and
nothing that could be used to build one: no televisions or
computers or readers or VR rigs, not even music decks. Nothing
could stop Myra carrying in whatever she liked – the
saddlebags were legally a diplomatic bag – but any
electronic or molecular contraband would have been confiscated
the moment she left. So hardbooks it had to be. The prisoners and
their families had an unquenchablethirst for them. Myra’s
every visit brought more additions to the drift.
    This time she had dozens of paperbacks with tasteful Modern
Art covers and grey spines, 20th Century Classics – Harold
Robbins, Stephen King, Dean Koontz and so on – which she
shoved across the table to the men whose names she didn’t
know. For her friends Nok-Yung and Se-Ha she’d saved the
best for