Read Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road for Free Online Page A

the Japanese car factories or the Clyde shipyards or
the wheat plains of Ukraine.
    Myra, however, felt somewhat cheered as the mare took her
through the light traffic of the noonday streets. The apple trees
were in bloom, and every wall had its fresh-looking, colourful
mural of flowers or stars or ships or crowds or children or
heroes or heroines. Real ancient space-age stuff, an effect
enhanced by the younger – genuinely young – people
enjoying the chilly sunshine in the fashionable scanty garb,
which recalled the late 1960s in its jaunty futurism. She looked
at girls in skinny tights and shiny, garish minidresses and found
herself wondering if they were cold… probably not, the
clothes were only an imitation of their nylon or PVC originals,
the nanofactured fabrics veined with heat-exchangers, laced with
molecular machines.
    The bright clothing gave the people on the street an
appearance of prosperity, but Myra was all too aware that it was
superficial. The clothes were cheaper than paper, easily
affordable even on Social Security. Over the past few years, with
the coming of the diamond ships, the heavy-booster market had
gone into free fall, and unemployment had rocketed. The dole was
paid by her department out of the rent from Mutual Protection,
and it couldn’t last. Nostalgia tourism – the old
spaceport was now a World Heritage Site, for what that was worth
-looked like the only promising source of employment.
    Before she knew it, the horse had stopped, from habit, outside
the modest ten-storey concrete office-block of the
republic’s government on Revolution Square. Myra sat still
for a moment, gazing wryly at this week’s morale-boosting
poster on the official billboard: a big black-and-white blow-up
of the classic Tass photo of Gagarin, grinning out from his
cosmonaut helmet. She remembered the time, in her grade-school
classroom on the Lower East Side, when she’d first seen
this human face and had formed some synaptic connection between
Gagarin’s grin and Guevara’s glare.
    Space and socialism. What a swindle it had all been. She shook
the reins, took the mare at a slow pace around to the back,
stabled it, wiped the muck from her boots and ascended the
stairs. The corridors to her office – at the front of the
building, as befitted a People’s Commissar for Social
Policy and Prime Minister Pro Tern and (now that she came to
think about it) Acting President – were filled with a
susurrus of hurrying feet and fast-fading whispers. Myra glanced
sharply at the groups she passed, but few seemed willing to
return her look.
    She closed the door of her office with a futile but
soul-satisfying slam. Let the apparatchiks worry about her mood,
if she had to worry about theirs. The last time she’d
sniffed this evasive air in the corridors had been just before
the first – and only -time she’d fallen out of power,
back in 2046. Then, she’d suspected an imminent move from
the Mutual Protection company and its proteges within the state
apparatus: a coup d’etat Now, she suspected that
Mutual Protection and its allies were into the final moves of a
much wider game-plan, as wide as itcould be: a coup du
monde. Or coup d’etoile!
    She stalked to the window, shedding her coat and hat and
gloves in quick, violent movements, leaned on her knuckles on the
sill and scanned her surroundings in a spasm of fang-baring
territoriality. No tanks or tramping feet sounded in her
city’s streets, no black helicopters clattered in her
country’s sky. What did she expect? There were days at
least to go before anything happened – and, when it did,
the opening blows would be overt in larger capitals than hers;
she’d be nipped by CNN soundbites in the new order’s
first seconds.
    She sighed and turned away, picked up her dropped clothes and
hung them carefully on the appropriate branches of a
chrome-plated rack. The office was as self-consciously