Free Wireless by Charles Stross

civilization together—which is a pretty pickle to find yourself in when you’re the bearer of news that will make the Politburo shit a brick. He desperately wants to be able to boost this up the ladder a bit, but instead it’s going to be his name and his alone on the masthead.
    “Bastards. Why couldn’t they give us a signal rocket or two?” He gulps back what’s left of the schnapps and winds a fresh sandwich of paper and carbon into his top-secret-eyes-only typewriter.
    “Because it would weigh too much, Misha,” the captain says right behind his left shoulder, causing him to jump and bang his head on the overhead locker.
    When Misha stops swearing and Gagarin stops chuckling, the Party man carefully turns his stack of typescript face down on the desk, then politely gestures the captain into his office. “What can I do for you, boss? And what do you mean, they’re too heavy?”
    Gagarin shrugs. “We looked into it. Sure, we could put a tape recorder and a transmitter into an ICBM and shoot it up to twenty thousand kilometers. Trouble is, it’d fall down again in an hour or so. The fastest we could squirt the message, it would cost about a thousand rubles a character—more to the point, even a lightweight rocket would weigh as much as our entire payload. Maybe in ten years.” He sits down. “How are you doing with that report?”
    Misha sighs. “How am I going to explain to Brezhnev that the Americans aren’t the only mad bastards with hydrogen bombs out here? That we’ve found the new world and the new world is just like the old world, except it glows in the dark? And the only communists we’ve found so far are termites with guns?” For a moment he looks haggard. “It’s been nice knowing you, Yuri.”
    “Come on! It can’t be that bad—” Gagarin’s normally sunny disposition is clouded.
    “You try and figure out how to break the news to them.” After identifying the first set of ruins, they’d sent one of their MiGs out, loaded with camera pods and fuel: a thousand kilometers inland it had seen the same ominous story of nuclear annihilation visited on an alien civilization: ruins of airports, railroads, cities, factories. A familiar topography in unfamiliar form.
    This was New York—once, thousands of years before a giant stamped the bottom of Manhattan Island into the seabed—and that was once Washington DC. Sure, there’d been extra skyscrapers, but they’d hardly needed the subsequent coastal cruise to be sure that what they were looking at was the same continent as the old capitalist enemy, thousands of years and millions of kilometers beyond a nuclear war. “We’re running away like a dog that’s seen the devil ride out, hoping that he doesn’t spot us and follow us home for a new winter hat.”
    Gagarin frowns. “Excuse me?” He points to the bottle of pear schnapps.
    “You are my guest.” Misha pours the first cosmonaut a glass, then tops up his own. “It opens certain ideological conflicts, Yuri. And nobody wants to be the bearer of bad news.”
    “Ideological—such as?”
    “Ah.” Misha takes a mouthful. “Well, we have so far avoided nuclear annihilation and invasion by the forces of reactionary terror during the Great Patriotic War, but only by the skin of our teeth. Now, doctrine has it that any alien species advanced enough to travel in space is almost certain to have discovered socialism, if not true Communism, no? And that the enemies of socialism wish to destroy socialism and take its resources for themselves. But what we’ve seen here is evidence of a different sort. This was America. It follows that somewhere nearby there is a continent that was home to another Soviet Union—two thousand years ago. But this America has been wiped out, and our elder Soviet brethren are not in evidence and they have not colonized this other-America—what can this mean?”
    Gagarin’s brow wrinkled. “They’re dead too? I mean, that the alternate-Americans wiped them