“Wait, what about the female editors—”
“Yes, and their wives are invited too.” Miriam gave him a look: Erasmus’s sardonic sense of humor could sometimes get the better of him. “The wording of the invitation assumes the membership are all men,” he explained. “The guild is full of deadwood because we needed somewhere to store it where it couldn’t do any more harm … Hmm. How would you like to borrow my bully pulpit to talk about equality? I’m sure they won’t dare make a fuss. After all, the invitation was addressed to ‘Commissioner Burgeson’: they simply forgot to specify which Commissioner Burgeson they were inviting to speak—”
“Oh you!” Miriam chuckled. “No, dammit. Picking fights with newspaper and wireless editors is—” She glanced sidelong. “You weren’t serious, were you?”
“Oh, I don’t know.” Erasmus drained his mug. “Sometimes I don’t know my own mind. We are surrounded by bigwigs and stuffed shirts. I’d be delighted to see you tear into them, but…” He shrugged. “We’d never hear the last of it.”
“Enough of them seem to hate us simply for existing.”
“You’re a constant reproach: a woman and a tireless overachiever. And I”—he spread his right hand above his heart, striking a dramatic pose—“am the henpecked husband! Merely the Commissioner for State Communications.” In charge of what had once been the State Ministry of Propaganda: now with oversight of all broadcasting, film, and print media, not to mention the embryonic network of clunky mainframe computers that were destined to grow into the Commonwealth’s Internet. “Miriam, you terrify them. The Ministry of Intertemporal Technological Intelligence scares everybody. What was that phrase? ‘Creative disruption’? Nobody is sure that your organization won’t make their own pocket empire obsolete tomorrow, but none of them dares move against you while MITI delivers the goods. Just don’t”—he paused to examine his mug—“underestimate the attraction of a little bit of decadence to old revolutionaries who think they’re due their reward.”
“I don’t,” Miriam said tersely. She finished her mug of cocoa. “Now I’m tired. It’s been a long day. Come to bed, Erasmus.”
“All right, but only if you promise to consider a vacation.”
She rose to her feet. “A vacation? We might be able to make some time for it next year—”
“No, Miriam, I mean this year. Next year we might not be here. Or there might be another crisis. One damn crisis after another: pretty soon you look round and realize you have no time left.”
“All right,” she relented. “Let’s look into it tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow. But first, to bed.”
Empire Games
MARACAIBO AERONAVAL COMPLEX, SOUTH AMERICA, TIME LINE THREE, SPRING 2020
Two vast concrete buildings sweltered beneath the noonday heat on the northern shore of Lake Maracaibo in New Granada, bleached white by sun and storm-driven spray from the Gulf of Venezuela to the north. Both buildings supported gigantic level platforms on their roofs. Bunkers and warehouses off to the west were linked to the platforms by gravel roadbeds. The complex was surrounded on all sides by razor-wire fences, patrolled by sweating soldiers from the Commonwealth Guard, who stuck to the air-conditioned interiors of their half tracks as much as possible.
On the far side of the isthmus, gleaming silver arrowheads waited beside a broad military runway, baking hot despite the canvas shades draped across their bubble canopies. The distant buzz of a trainer conducting touch-and-go landings on the second runway rose and fell periodically, disturbing the too-still air. But nobody ventured outside in the noonday heat without good reason.
Then, as if in competition with the somnolent drone of the trainer’s engine, another engine note began to rise. It was the shrill jet-howl of a government courier plane, on final approach into the sprawling lizard-stillness of the Maracaibo Aeronaval Complex. The Explorer-General’s wife (who according to persistent rumors was herself involved at a high level in MITI’s para-time espionage program) was returning from the capital, two thousand miles to the north.
The Explorer-General himself was being fitted for a pressure suit when the telephone rang. He was standing in a sagging mass of fabric and artificial rubber, suspended by its shoulders from a scaffold while a pair of technicians worked on his inner helmet: “If it’s for me, I’ll be ten minutes,” he said. “Oh, and find out who—” Only a very few people could get through to him while he was spending either of the two days a week he jealously clung to for practical work, as opposed to the endless meetings and administrative sessions that had eaten his life since he became a senior officer.
“Sir, it’s your wife. She said to say she’s landed and she’ll meet you in staging area two in an hour.”
“Oh.” Huw nodded—or tried to, inasmuch as nodding wasn’t terribly practical while wearing a rigid helmet with a raised glass visor. “Let’s finish up with the helmet today and we can sort out the legs tomorrow—”
“Sir? Would you mind holding still for a minute?”
Huw surrendered. The pressure suit was a new model, loosely copied from a Russian Sokol KV-2 that Brilliana had somehow obtained for him by way of the DPR: a survival space suit, designed to keep cosmonauts alive inside their Soyuz capsules in the event of an in-flight emergency. It weighed only ten kilos: cumbersome, but far easier to move in than a full-up EVA-certified suit. Huw wanted it very badly. It was intended to keep Explorer Corps world-walkers alive during the critical minutes it might take before they could escape, if they found themselves trailblazing a time line with a nonbreathable atmosphere. But being fitted for any space suit was tedious—like all pressure garments, it had to be tailored to the individual wearer and adjusted for a good fit. And he’d insisted on seeing for himself, a decision he was now regretting.
Half an hour later the suit team allowed him to undress, their final set of measurements recorded. “We should have it ready for you by next Wednesday,” said the seniormost fitter, “assuming they’ve got enough umbilical sets. There was a parts shortage last month.”
“Fine,” Huw grunted. The astronaut corps was greedy for all the space-rated kit. But it wasn’t as if his part-time project was going anywhere in the next week anyway. “Send me a memo when it’s ready.” He pulled up his trousers. “See you on Wednesday.”