Free Wireless by Charles Stross Page A

out in an act of colonialist imperialist aggression but did not survive their treachery,” he adds hastily.
    Misha’s lips quirk in something approaching a grin: “Better work on getting your terminology right the first time before you see Brezhnev, comrade,” he says. “Yes, you are correct on the facts, but there are matters of interpretation to consider. No colonial exploitation has occurred. So either the perpetrators were also wiped out, or perhaps . . . Well, it opens up several very dangerous avenues of thought. Because if New Soviet Man isn’t home hereabouts, it implies that something happened to them, doesn’t it? Where are all the true communists? If it turns out that they ran into hostile aliens, then . . . Well, theory says that aliens should be good brother socialists. Theory and ten rubles will buy you a bottle of vodka on this one. Something is badly wrong with our understanding of the direction of history.”
    “I suppose there’s no question that there’s something we don’t know about,” Gagarin adds in the ensuing silence, almost as an afterthought.
    “Yes. And that’s a fig leaf of uncertainty we can hide behind, I hope.” Misha puts his glass down and stretches his arms behind his head, fingers interlaced until his knuckles crackle. “Before we left, our agents reported signals picked up in America from—damn, I should not be telling you this without authorization. Pretend I said nothing.” His frown returns.
    “You sound as if you’re having dismal thoughts,” Gagarin prods.
    “I am having dismal thoughts, Comrade Colonel-General, very dismal thoughts indeed. We have been behaving as if this world we occupy is merely a new geopolitical game board, have we not? Secure in the knowledge that brother socialists from beyond the stars brought us here to save us from the folly of the imperialist aggressors, or that anyone else we meet will be either barbarians or good communists, we have fallen into the pattern of an earlier age—expanding in all directions, recognizing no limits, assuming our manifest destiny. But what if there are limits? Not a barbed-wire fence or a line in the sand, but something more subtle. Why does history demand success of us? What we know is the right way for humans on a human world, with an industrial society, to live. But this is not a human world. And what if it’s a world in which we’re not destined to succeed? Or what if the very circumstances that gave rise to Marxism are themselves transient, in the broader scale? What if there is a—you’ll pardon me—a materialist God? We know this is our own far future we are living in. Why would any power vast enough to build this disk bring us here?”
    Gagarin shakes his head. “There are no limits, my friend,” he says, a trifle condescendingly. “If there were, do you think we would have gotten this far?”
    Misha thumps his desk angrily. “Why do you think they put us somewhere where your precious rockets don’t work?” he demands. “Get up on high, one push of rocket exhaust, and you could be halfway to anywhere! But down here we have to slog through the atmosphere. We can’t get away! Does that sound like a gift from one friend to another?”
    “The way you are thinking sounds paranoid to me,” Gagarin insists. “I’m not saying you’re wrong, mind you: only—could you be overwrought? Finding those bombed cities affected us all, I think.”
    Misha glances out of his airliner-sized porthole: “I fear there’s more to it than that. We’re not unique, comrade; we’ve been here before. And we all died. We’re a fucking duplicate, Yuri Alexeyevich, there’s a larger context to all this. And I’m scared by what the Politburo will decide to do when they see the evidence. Or what the Americans will do . . .”

LAST SUPPER
    Returning to Manhattan is a comfort of sorts for Gregor, after the exposed plazas and paranoid open vistas of the capital. Unfortunately, he won’t be here for long—he