Complete Short Fiction, page 104
“Korolev wanted to go to the Moon too, but found himself putting atomic bombs on top of rockets to destroy New York City. Even Sakharov loved his bomb. He wanted to understand the Sun, and he found a way to destroy cities with what he learned, working for men who would tear your fingernails out with pliers as easy as I talk to you now. Men he never would have broken bread with. But he let them stand over him in their bloodstained boots. Because they let him build and understand. Someone above knew us better than we knew ourselves.”
He threaded a cotter pin through the hub, took the needlenosed pliers and bent it to hold. You could see the satisfaction he took in having just the right tool for the job, hanging right there in the tool rack, a tool rack my father never used.
“I am no different. I worked on missiles, as well as satellites and spacecraft. It was like anything else. Not defense of the motherland, or a desperate attempt to equalize power with the capitalist enemy. Just work, interesting work. Good work, what a man lives for. We sat in that miserable desert for years, testing. Not enough testing, for we were always in a hurry. You should static test all engines. Americans always do. They can afford it. We did not. Hurry, hurry. We had to meet our schedules, get the engines working, get them firing. Once we were testing an ICBM. The R-9. Oxidized with liquid oxygen. Made no sense for an ICBM. I can admit that now, but then we fought with the other design bureaus, some who were developing storable propellants. An ICBM needs to be launched quickly, and so needs a storable propellant. A space probe or manned flight, not so much. So, were we secretly working on what we really wanted to work on? An interplanetary spacecraft disguised as an ICBM? No. We were working on a weapon. It just wasn’t a very good weapon. It does not excuse us.
“We were testing the first stage. We had built a test pad: a fixed part, and part that rotated on it. The missile was attached to the movable portion. We were ready to ignite, when I saw a cloud of mist at the pad. We were way behind schedule. Khrushchev himself, we were told, had an interest in this test. He needed to threaten the Americans with our might, and no one was to know that we had no missiles. Your John Kennedy complained about how many missiles the Russians had, and how badly the Americans had done under Eisenhower. Fantastic nonsense. I suppose we would have laughed if we had not been so busy trying to make sure he was right. He won his election, for all the good it did him. Is that democracy, that you get to choose your lies? We had to take the lies we were issued.
“Condensation meant a leak, which meant a delay in the test, which meant . . . we did not want to discover what it meant. I went out to the pad. It was a night test, no one was seeing me. It was a liquid oxygen leak, a small one. The repair would take at least a day, but . . . I unzipped, and I pissed on the leaky joint. It froze into ice and plugged the leak. It held until ignition, and the test went off well. That was how we did things at that time.”
He took the lawnmower back. A short while later I heard it start up. The bastard. Did he think he could charm Mrs. Melmar by doing her lawn? A few hours later he came back, as glum as when he went, and put the mower away without cleaning it off. And he’d left a few stray lines of grass uncut. I snuck over and trimmed them later, with hand shears. It’s no wonder you don’t see many Russians in lawn care.
Vassily avidly watched the Apollo coverage—with pleasure at the accomplishment, but with sadness too. Because he was watching for something else. Something that never came.
All that year, the Soviets were trying to launch the complex, thirty-engined N-1, which was to be their lunar launch vehicle. And, because of inadequate static testing, because of the fact that every piece of it was essentially a one-off, because they had to hurry, it kept blowing up only seconds after liftoff. No TV commentator ever mentioned what was going on at what they would have called Baikonur.
Vassily tried to convince himself that if only Korolev had lived, a Russian might still have ended up walking on a dusty surface not too different from the dusty steppes of central Kazakhstan, but I don’t think he ever succeeded.
Years later, while traveling on business, I found Kolya Mishkin at his retirement home in Sarasota. A simple phone call, and he invited me over. His wife, Kumiko, somehow pegged me as Russian, and served me a variety of foods preserved by smoking, salting, and fermentation, along with vodka in ornate shot glasses. Kolya told me a few things about Vassily that I never learned while he lived with us. He and Vassily were no longer in touch. I could tell this hurt him.
Vassily had had a wife named Irina who was a physician in the Red Army and was taken prisoner by the Germans at Vyazma, in 1941, along with half a million of her comrades. She never came back. Presumably she died in one of those open-air cattle pens the Germans kept Soviet POWs in, regarding them as barely human. Kolya said she might well have come back, only to be rearrested by the NKVD, as all ex-POWs were, being of suspect loyalty, and shipped to a Soviet camp, to die there.
Vassily and Irina never had children.
Vassily was arrested in 1938 after other members of his aircraft design team, already in custody, cited his name as a saboteur. One of their test aircraft had recently crashed on takeoff and damaged a wing. He was in the middle of dinner with Irina. They had been married for five months. They never saw each other again.
Vassily lost his teeth in the gold-mining camps of Kolyma. He’d had one of them, a molar, which he kept in a jar when he lived with us, along with a gallstone (not his, but not an interesting story either), a rubber lizard, and a valve from the fuel line of a German V-2 rocket he’d picked up at the testing site in Blizna, Poland.
He worked with three of the colleagues who had betrayed him in various space projects in the years after the war. One of them even ended up running a design bureau. Vassily never brought up what had happened, and neither did they. Two of them he liked and continued to drink with, and one of them, the bureau chief, he feuded with, but none of that had anything to do with 1938. It would have made no more sense for him to be angry or vengeful about that than it would have been to react to something they had done to him in a dream.
Kolya, Vassily, and Irina had all been school friends. After a few vodkas, Kolya revealed that he had once been interested in Irina as well. But he was assigned to the hydroelectric project at Bratsk before an understanding could be reached, and she married Vassily two days after her father, an officer, was arrested, in the Red Army purges that followed the execution of Field Marshal Tukhachevsky in 1937.
Every year, Kolya lit a candle on Irina’s birthday, even though Russians only learned to care about birthdays after coming to America. I was able to tell him that, at least once, Vassily had done the same.
After a glance at his wife, who smiled permission, Kolya went into his study and returned with the woman’s portrait Vassily had done. It was Irina. Vassily had had no photographs of her, and so had done it from memory. He’d given it to Kolya as a present during his visit. Kolya had tried to give it back, but Vassily refused, saying he could draw another one.
Neither Kolya nor I thought he’d ever drawn another one.
One day, near the end of the summer, Vassily disappeared.
So, to the wonder of the entire neighborhood, did Mrs. Melmar. Her youngest was now at Penn State, and it might have been that she now saw no reason to stick around.
The idea that they had disappeared together took a long time to be accepted.
My mother packed up a few things that Vassily had forgotten, but did not tell Papa what address she was sending them to. That led to the worst fight they had ever had. They got over that, but have never seemed as happy with each other since.
The next tenant was a sad man with a face like a frog who said he was writing a history of the twentieth century. I don’t know if he ever finished it, but he lived there until long after I went to college. The room is now empty.
Vassily did not leave anything for me. Not a book, not a note, nothing. He just walked out and left, exactly as if I was a kid he really didn’t have much interest in.
I think about Vassily every time our makeshift space shuttle blows up, killing a handful of astronauts, or, more optimistically, whenever an elegant space probe flies past the uncut diamond of a moon. He would have admired those smooth gadgets, so unmakeshift, so unmanned, so . . . unSoviet. The space shuttle, a thalidomide version of the proud spaceships that once flew in our imagination, is completely Soviet.
The Soviets themselves thought it even more Soviet than it actually was. When the thing was announced, they analyzed the costs. It made no sense. Any number of expendable launch vehicles would have been cheaper for the missions the thing could possibly perform. And Americans, after all, love to throw things away. What were they really up to?
Then they saw its trajectory: a military payload lofted into orbit from Vandenberg could reenter and hit central Russia in three and a half minutes. A Polaris missile launched from a boomer off Kamchatka in a first strike would take at least ten.
So that’s how they managed to understand the shuttle: as a weapon. For once their economic analysis made perfect sense, but they still reached the wrong conclusion. They dropped the rest of their space program and developed their own shuttle, the Buran. It flew only once, then sat in a warehouse at Tyuratam until a fire destroyed it, along with whatever was left of the program Vassily gave so many years of his life to.
I see the shuttle has tile problems again. Every time someone drops a paperclip, it has tile problems. I’d love to talk that over with Vassily, but he can’t possibly still be alive.
2010
Blind Cat Dance
Alexander Jablokov tells us that, “in the last decade of the last century I was quite productive, with five novels and a number of short stories (most of them in Asimov’s). Family and career took a toll, and I have not been visible in the past few years. But, after much struggle, I seem to have figured out how to run a full-time job and a life, while getting my writing done too.” The author’s new novel, Brain Thief, was recently published by Tor Books and he is currently shopping another novel around, while writing stories again as well. After you read his multifaceted new tale about a future in which very few of Earth’s inhabitants seem to have a clear view of what is really going on, you can visit his website www.ajablokov.com.
Encounter #1
Cafe Kulfi
The cougar stalks into the cafe, its skin loose, looking relaxed, even a bit bored. Its padded feet are silent on the terrazzo. Conversation at the tables drops for a moment, but then, when the cat doesn’t immediately kill anything, gets noisy again.
Berenika sits near the back, on a banquette, with her friends from before, Mria and Paolo. Mria is small and nervous, with spiky frosted hair. Paolo is tall, with big ears and Adam’s apple.
“You don’t mean you, like, just left.” Mria can’t believe it. “Walked out on Mark.”
“You can’t just walk out of that place, can you?” Paolo says. “That’s miles of desert. You could die. You must have gotten a ride. Who gave you a ride?”
“Oh, sure,” Mria says. “That’s what we need to know. Her means of transportation.” Paolo looks hurt. “I was just saying she could have called me to come get her. I would have done it. Right, Berenika? Far, but I would have done it for you.”
Berenika is solemn. “Thank you, Paolo.”
“But who—”
“Oh!” Mria turns her head sharply toward Berenika, hoping her hair will exclude Paolo from the conversation. “But what did Mark do? What did he say?”
“Not much, really,” Berenika says. “By that point, I think he realized there wasn’t anything he could do.”
“You must know your husband better than that,” Mria says. “There’s always something he can do. Has he called you? Hired people to kidnap you? Planted himself in your yard and let birds nest in his hair?”
“No.” Berenika clearly doesn’t want to talk about it. “Nothing like that.”
“We were all going to Easter Island.” Paolo is mournful. “To that new jungle. I was already packed.”
“Ah,” Mria says. “Procrastination pays off again. I hadn’t even found my suitcase yet.”
“That’s actually not funny.” Paolo blinks slowly. “I was looking forward to it.”
“Oh, so was I.” Mria waggles her cup over her shoulder at me without looking, an annoying habit. “So was I. I need a break. Easter Island. Giant heads, buried under vines. And you, Berenika. It was your idea in the first place. You wanted some special tour to see how they brought everything back. More than back. I don’t think the jungle was as dense before people came there.”
Berenika isn’t paying much attention to the discussion about the ecological restoration of Easter Island, which, with variations, they’ve already had several times. She’s watching the cougar. No one else is, because it doesn’t really seem to be doing anything.
It’s a male cougar, Puma concolor, medium-sized for its species at 130 pounds, six feet long. It is utterly still, not even the tip of its long, luxurious tail moving. Its fur is red-brown, paler under its muzzle and on its belly. That color matches that of the local population of deer. There are no deer in the cafe. Its hazel eyes are dilated in the dimness. It can’t see color, but can detect the smallest movement.
It has sensed the shadow of something. It is on full alert. And well it should be. It’s out of its territorial range, and on the edge of the range of another male. A bigger male.
It doesn’t really know that yet. Right now, it’s just checking things out.
I refill Mria’s cup, but she just sighs at the delay, not noticing me.
“Weren’t you looking forward to it?” Mria’s voice gets penetrating. “Berenika!”
“What?” Berenika looks at her friends. “Sure. Of course I was.”
“That would have been a great place for you to learn about . . . restoration methods, whatever it was.” Paolo sighs. “I bought this nice linen jacket. . . .”
“Return it.” Mria turns to cut him out again. “You’re not seriously still interested in working, like, with animals, Berenika. Are you?”
“I am.” Berenika smiles, just for a split second, a flash of light. “I’m sure they wouldn’t let me start with animals, but that’s still what I want.”
“Oh! That’s ridiculous. Just leave them alone, why don’t you? Let them be themselves. Natural, like they’re supposed to be.”
They all look at the cougar, which is again on the move.
It doesn’t see anything at the tables it moves past. It believes the cafe to be empty, in fact sees the space as a clearing in a larger forest.
“Okay,” Mria says. “Maybe that’s not so natural. I didn’t even really notice when these things started wandering around. Where does the thing take a crap? Not in here, I hope.” She picks up her feet so her pumps don’t touch the floor.
“It’s trained to go in a certain spot, where it gets recycled,” Berenika says. “You might not have noticed it, but there’s a place under the bushes in front of the candle store. And it looked like there was another cougar that usually used it.”
And then she sniffs.
“The service here sucks,” Mria says. “But the place seems clean enough.” She keeps her feet up, though, just in case.
“You checked in the cat toilet?” Paolo says. “And you could tell who’d used it?”
But now Berenika is up. She stalks around, tall and loose, a bit of a cat herself. The combs in her thick, black hair glint in the dimness. The cougar jerks its head, and she freezes. It looks past her. Somewhere, inside, it is deeply frustrated, knowing it’s missing something but having no way of figuring out what it is.
She kneels and sniffs a corner by the counter. Mark had led me to expect someone a bit more . . . romantic. Not interested in the yucky details of how we actually get these animals to survive among us. She hitches her skirt up a bit to free up her movements and sniffs again. She’s dressed beautifully, with several layers of translucent fabric of contrasting patterns.
People in the cafe are now watching her, not the cougar.
Paolo shreds his napkin in embarrassment, then closes his eyes.
It wouldn’t be natural for me not to react.
“Have you lost something, miss?”
She stands up next to me. “We’re in another cougar’s territory here. Where is it now?”
I’m startled. Did she actually examine the feces in the waste recycler in the plaza? “I’ve seen one, I guess. Another cat, right? But I don’t know. I could ask . . .”
“That’s all right.” She heads back to her table, having dismissed me as useless.
That’s the point. That’s why I’m wearing this stupid padded white jacket, like a fencer, or something. I’m supposed to be taking care of things in the background.
I still wish she’d have really looked at me.
“Their urine has been modified to smell kind of like turpentine.” Berenika slides neatly back into her seat. “To us. To each other, it still smells jagged and aggressive.”
“That’s charming,” Paolo says.
“It’s a lot of work to get it just right,” Berenika says. “Real skill.” If only she knew. “But we’re definitely on an established territory. I bet that other cougar is out past all those little stands in the plaza. There must be good hunting for small game in the shrubs.”
She’s absolutely right. That other cougar, larger and stronger than this one, isn’t part of the story yet, but there is the potential for drama. Fights over territory and access to sex always sell.
