Late that night Charmian brought a special kind of darkness down to my cubicle, individual doses sealed in heavy foil. It was nothing like the darkness of Big Night, that sentient, hunting dark that waits to drag the hitchhikers down to Wards, that dark that incubates the Fear. It was a darkness like the shadows moving in the back seat of your parents’ car, on a rainy night when you’.re five years old, warm and secure. Charmian’s a lot slicker that I am when it comes to getting past the clipboard tickers, the ones like Nevsky. I didn’t ask her why she was back from Heaven, or what had happened to Jorge. She didn’t ask me any- thing about Leni. Hiro was gone, off the air entirely. I’d seen him at the debriefing that afternoon; as usual, our eyes didn’t meet. It didn’t matter. I knew he’d be back. It had been business as usual, really. A bad day in Heaven, but it’s never easy. It’s hard when you feel the Fear for the first time, but I’ve always known it was there, waiting. They talked about Leni’s diagrams and about her ballpoint sketches of molecular chains that shift on command. Molecules that can function as switches, logic elements, even a kind of wiring, built up in layers into a single very large molecule, a very small computer. We’ll probably never know what she met out there; we’ll probably never know the details of the transaction. We might be sorry if we ever found out. We aren’t the only hinter- land tribe, the only ones looking for scraps. Damn Leni, damn that Frenchman, damn all the ones who bring things home, who bring cancer cures, seashells, things without names who keep us here wait- ing, who fill Wards, who bring us the Fear. But cling to this dark, warm and close, to Charmian’s slow breath- ing, to the rhythm of the sea. You get high enough out here; you’ll hear the sea, deep down behind the constant conch-shell static of the bonephone. It’s something we carry with us, no matter how far from home. Charmian stirred beside me, muttered a stranger’s name, the name of some broken traveler long gone down to Wards. She holds the current record; she kept a man alive for two weeks, until he put his eyes out with his thumbs. She screamed all the way down, broke her nails on the elevator’s plastic lid. Then they sedated her. We both have the drive, though, that special need, that freak dynamic that lets us keep going back to Heaven. We both got it the same way, lay out there in our little boats for weeks, waiting for the Highway to take us. And when our last flare was gone, we were hauled back here by tugs. Some people just aren’t taken, and nobody knows why. And you’ll never get a second chance. They say it’s too expensive, but what they really mean, as they eye the bandages on your wrists, is that now you’re too valuable, too much use to them as a potential surrogate. Don’t worry about the suicide attempt, they’ll tell you; happens all the time. Perfectly understandable: feeling of profound rejection. But I’d wanted to go, wanted it so bad. Charmian, too. She tried with pills. But they worked on us, twisted us a little, aligned our drives, planted the bonephones, paired us with handlers. Olga must have known, must have seen it all, somehow~ she was trying to keep us from finding our way out there, where she’d been. She knew that if we found her, we’d have to go. Even now, knowing what I know, I still want to go. I never will. But we can swing here in this dark that towers way above us, Charmian’s hand in mind. Between our palms the drug’s torn foil wrapper. And Saint Olga smiles out at us from the walls; you can feel her, all those prints from the same publicity shot, torn and taped across the walls of night, her white smile, forever.
Red Star, Winter Orbit by Bruce Sterling and William Gibson
Colonel Korolev twisted slowly in his harness, dreaming of winter and gravity. Young again, a cadet, he whipped his horse across the late November steppes of Kazakh- stan into dry red vistas of Martian sunset. That’s wrong, he thought And woke in the Museum of the Soviet Triumph in Space to the sounds of Romanenko and the KGB man’s wife. They were going at it again behind the screen at the aft end of the Salyut, restraining straps and padded hull creaking and thudding rhythmically. Hooves in the snow. Freeing himself from the harness, Korolev executed a practiced kick that propelled him into the toilet stall. Shrugging out of his threadbare coverall, he clamped the commode around his loins and wiped condensed steam from the steel mirror. His arthritic hand had swollen again during sleep; the wrist was bird-bone thin from calcium loss. Twenty years had passed since he’d last known gravity; he’d grown old in orbit. He shaved with a suction razor. A patchwork of broken veins blotched his left cheek and temple, another legacy from the blowout that had crippled him. When he emerged, he found that the adulterers had finished. Romanenko was adjusting his clothing. The political officer’s wife, Valentina, had ripped the sleeves from her brown coverall; her white arms were sheened with the sweat of their exertion. Her ash-blond hair rippled in the breeze from a ventilator. Her eyes were purest cornflower blue, set a little too closely together, and they held a look half-apologetic, half-conspirator- ial. “See what we’ve brought you, Colonel She handed him a tiny airline bottle of cognac. Stunned, Korolev blinked at the Air France logo embossed on the plastic cap. “It came in the last Soyuz. In a cucumber, my hus- band said.” She giggled. “He gave it to me.” “We decided you should have it, Colonel,” Ro- manenko said, grinning broadly. “After all, we can be furloughed at any time.” Korolev ignored the sidelong, embarrassed glance at his shriveled legs and pale, dangling feet. He opened the bottle, and the ~rich aroma brought a sudden tingling rush of blood to his cheeks. He raised it carefully and sucked out a few milliliters of brandy. It burned like acid. “Christ,” he gasped, “it’s been years. I’ll get plastered!” he said, laughing, tears blurring his vision. “My father tells me you drank like a hero, Colonel, in the old days.~~ “Yes,” Korolev said, and sipped again, “I did.” The cognac spread through him like liquid gold. He disliked Romanenko. He’d never liked the boy’s father, either an easygoing Party man, long since settled into lecture tours, a dacha on the Black Sea, American li- quor, French suits, Italian shoes. . . . The boy had the father’s looks, the same clear gray eyes utterly untrou- bled by doubt. The alcohol surged through Korolev’s thin blood. “You are too generous,” he said. He kicked once, gently, and arrived at his console. “You must take some sam isdata, American cable broadcasts, freshly inter- cepted. Racy stuff! Wasted on an old man like me.” He slotted a blank cassette and punched for the material. “I’ll give it to the gun crew,” Romanenko said, grinning. “They can run it on the tracking consoles in the gun room.” The particle-beam station had always been known as the gun room. The soldiers who manned it were particularly hungry for this sort of tape. Korolev ran off a second copy for Valentina. “It’s dirty?” She looked alarmed and intrigued. “May we come again, Colonel? Thursday at 2400?” Korolev smiled at her. She had been a factory worker before she’d been singled out for space. Her beauty made her useful as a propaganda tool, a role model for the proletariat. He pitied her now, with the cognac coursing through his veins, and found it im- possible to deny her a little happiness. “A midnight rendezvous in the museum, Valentina? Romantic!” She kissed his cheek, wobbling in free fall. “Thank you, my Colonel.” “You’re a prince, Colonel,” Romanenko said, slapping Korolev’s matchstick shoulder as gently as he could. After countless hours on an exerciser, the boy’s arms bulged like a blacksmith’s. Korolev watched the lovers carefully make their way out into the central docking sphere, the junction of three aging Salyuts and two corridors. Romanenko took the “north” corridor to the gun room; Valentina went in the opposite direction to the next junction sphere and the Salyut where her husband slept. There were five docking spheres in Kosmograd, each with its three linked Salyuts. At opposite ends of the complex were the military installation ~nd the satellite launchers. Popping, humming, and wheezing, the station had the feel of a subway and the dank metallic reek of a tramp steamer. Korolev had another pull at the bottle. Now it was half-empty. He hid it in one of the museum’s exhibits, a NASA Hasselblad recovered from the site of the Apollo landing. He hadn’t had a drink since his last furlough, before the blowout. His head swam in a pleasant, pain- ful current of drunken nostalgia. Drifting back to his console, he accessed a section of memory where the collected speeches of Alexci Kosy- gin had been covertly erased and replaced with his per- sonal collection of samisdata, digitized pop music, his boyhood favorites from the Eighties. He had British groups taped from West German radio, Warsaw Pact heavy metal, American imports from the black market. Putting on his headphones, he punched for the Czestochowa reggae of Brygada Cryzis. After all the years, he no longer really heard the music, but images came rushing back with an aching poignancy. In the Eighties he’d been a long-haired child of the Soviet elite, his father’s Position placing him ef- fectively beyond the reach of the Moscow police. He remembered feedback howling through the speakers in the hot darkness of a cellar club, th’e crowd a shadowy checkerboard of denim and bleached hair. He’d smoked Marlboros laced with powdered Afghani hash. He re- membered the mouth of an American diplomat’s daughter in the back seat of her father’s black Lincoln. Names and faces came flooding in on a warm haze of cognac. Nina, the East German who’d shown him her mimeographed translations of dissident Polish news- sheets Until the night she didn’t turn up at the coffee bar. Whispers of parasitism, of anti-Soviet activity, of the waiting chemical horrors of the psikuska Korolev started to tremble. He wiped his face and found it bathed in sweat. He took off the headphones. It had been fifty years, yet he was suddenly and very intensely afraid. He couldn’t remember ever having been this frightened, not even during the blowout that had crushed his hip. He shook violently. The lights. The lights in the Salyut were too bright, but he didn’t want to go to the switches. A simple action, one he performed regularly, yet. . . The switches and their insulated cables were somehow threatening. He stared, confused. The little clockwork model of a Lunokhod moon rover, its Velcro wheels gripping the curved wall, seemed to crouch there like something sentient, poised, waiting. The eyes of the Soviet space pioneers in the official por- traits were fixed on him with contempt. The cognac. His years in free fall had warped his metabolism. He wasn’t the man he’d once been. But he would remain calm and try to ride it out. If he threw up, everyone would laugh. Someone knocked at the entrance to the museum, and Nikita the Plumber, Kosmograd’s premier han- dyman, executed a perfect slow-motion dive through the open hatch. The young civilian engineer looked angry. Korolev felt cowed. “You’re up early, Plumber,” he said, anxious for some facade of normality. “Pinhead leakage in Delta Three.” He frowned. “Do you understand Japanese?” The Plumber tugged a cassette from one of the dozen pockets that bulged on his stained work vest and waved it in Korolev’s face. He wore carefully laundered Levi’s and dilapidated Adidas running shoes. “We accessed this last night.” Korolev cowered as though the cassette were a weapon. “No, no Japanese.” The meekness of his own voice startled him. “Only English and Polish.” He felt himself blush. The Plumber was his friend; he knew and trusted the Plumber, but “Are you well, Colonel?” The Plumber loaded the tape and punched up a lexicon program with deft, callused fingers. “You look as though you just ate a bug. I want you to hear this.” Korolev watched uneasily as the tape flickered into an ad for baseball gloves. The lexicon’s Cyrillic subtitles raced across the monitor as a Japanese voice-over rat- tIed maniacally. “The newscast’s coming up,” said the Plumber, gnawing at a cuticle. Korolev squinted anxiously as the translation slid across the face of the Japanese announcer: AMERICAN DISARMAMENT GROUP CLAIMS PREPARATIONS AT BAIKONUR COSMODROME… PROVE RUSSIANS AT LAST READY. . . TO SCRAP ARMED SPACE STATION COMIC CITY… “Cosmic,” the Plumber muttered. “Glitch in the lexicon.” BUILT AT TURN OF CENTURY AS BRIDGEHEAD TO SPACE… AMBITIOUS PROJECT CRIPPLED BY FAILURE OF LUNAR MINING . . . EXPENSIVE STATION OUTPERFORMED BY OUR UNMANNED ORBITAL FA~ORIES… CRYSTALS, SEMICONDUCTORS AND PURE DRUGS… “Smug bastards.” The Plumber snorted. “I tell you, it’s that goddamned KGB man Yefremov. He’s had a hand in this!” STAGGERING SOVIET TRADE DEFICITS. . . POPULAR DISCONTENT WITH SPACE EFFORT… R~CENT DECISIONS BY POLITBURO AND CENTRAL COMMITTEE SECRETAR- IAT… “They’re shutting us down!” The Plumber’s face contorted with rage. Korolev twisted away from the screen, shaking un- controllably. Sudden tears peeled from his lashes in free-fall droplets. “Leave me alone! I can do nothing!” “What’s wrong, Colonel?” The Plumber grabbed his shoulders. “Look me in the face. Someone’s dosed you with the Fear!” “Go away~” Korolev begged. “That little spook bastard! What has he given you? Pills? An injection?” Korolev shuddered. “I had a drink ” “He gave you the Fear! You~ a sick old man! I’ll break his face!” The Plumber jerked his knees up, somersaulted backward, kicked off from a handhold overhead, and catapulted out of the room. “Wait! Plumber!” But the Plumber had zipped through the docking sphere like a squirrel, vanishing down the corridor, and now Korolev felt that he couldn’t bear to be alone. In the distance he could hear metallic echoes of distorted, angry shouts. Trembling, he closed his eyes and waited for some- one to help him.