First Cosmic Velocity

by Zach Powers

  THE HOTEL ROOM was barely nicer than the dormitories at Star City, which the cosmonauts referred to as the gulag, at least when the Chief Designer and the engineers of his generation were not around. Many of the engineers had spent time in actual gulags, and the rest had seen friends and family sent there, never to return. It was a joke in poor taste, yes, but the cosmonauts were doomed to the same fate. It was about more than just the shoddy construction and limited amenities of the dormitories.

  Leonid sat on the creaking bed, loosening his tie and unbuttoning his collar. The room sweltered. The window was open, but no breeze entered, just the creeping heat. Leonid slipped off his jacket and discarded it on the other side of the bed. The battered armoire in the corner had no hangers inside.

  Ignatius had deposited Leonid and Nadya in the hotel and then left, saying she would be back in an hour. Had it been an hour already? Leonid wore a watch but had neglected to wind it for months. Since the day of his brother’s launch. He wished he had brought a book. Giorgi was always recommending things to read, to Leonid and all the other cosmonauts, but no one ever took his advice. Besides the many manuals written by the engineers for training, the cosmonauts never read anything. None of them except Giorgi, and he seemed able to do everything all at once. Did Liski have a bookstore? Wait, the city was now called what? Did Georgiu-Dezh have a bookstore? Did the town called Liski have a bookstore that had since closed, so that one of the names had a bookstore but the other did not?

  Leonid stood and walked to the window for the dozenth time. He was on the second floor. Below him was a narrow lane, sun-washed sky above. And before him, a stone wall, so close it seemed he could reach across and touch it. It was farther away than it seemed.

  The door opened, and Nadya came in without knocking. She joined Leonid by the window. To someone seeing them from behind, it would appear as if they were gazing out at a great scene beyond, as if the window overlooked a breathtaking vista.

  “It’s better than my view,” said Nadya.

  “You’ve found a grayer wall than this?”

  “My window faces the city. But it’s not really a city. It’s a town pretending to be a city. The buildings are covered with city-like façades, and the people wear clothes copied from Moscow. It’s like a child aping older siblings.”

  “I was the eldest, if only by minutes.”

  “Who did you copy?”

  “The men of the village, I suppose.”

  “Maybe our individual personalities are just the areas in which we failed to perfectly copy someone else, all individuality a mistake.”

  “But if we mistake the mistakes of the previous generation, then perhaps we right them. Maybe we’re exactly like the people that the people we tried to emulate tried to emulate.”

  Nadya left his side and sat on the end of the bed, directly on top of his jacket.

  “These beds are terrible,” she said.

  “It doesn’t help that you’re sitting on my medals.”

  “I have more than you.” She ran her hand along the line of them. They clicked together with a pathetic, tinny sound. She shifted on the bed, but did not move off Leonid’s jacket. She grasped one of her medals in particular. “This one is from the French.”

  “Ignatius lets you wear it?”

  “I doubt there’s anyone who can identify all of them. I received a ribbon once as a child. If I still had it, I would wear it, too.”

  The door opened and Ignatius entered without knocking.

  “Yes, please,” said Leonid, “come in! Come in!”

  “It’s time to go.” She glanced around the room, pausing at the open armoire. “Where’s your jacket?”

  Nadya raised herself off the bed just enough to slide the jacket out from under her. She held it up for Ignatius to see. Ignatius took the jacket, shook it once like fluffing a pillow, and tossed it across the room to Leonid. The medals clicked together.

  * * *

  • • •

  UP CLOSE, GEORGIU-DEZH’S sobor rose to an impressive height, the main golden dome visible only from the underside, its point implied but unseen. The four smaller domes were set half as high in the ordinal directions. A gray base surrounded the whole church like a fortification. The walls above it shone so white in the sun that Leonid had to squint when he faced them. Out front stood a statue of Lenin, upturned hand held out as if in offering. Leonid had seen old men in a Paris park posed the same way, feeding stale bits of bread to birds from their palms.

  A panel truck, left over from the war and as old as Leonid at least, was parked in front of the church. The drab army green had been painted over with a mural taking up the whole side. The mural depicted, in the flat style typical of propaganda posters, a rocket launching into space, arcing back toward the center of the frame. From the bottom corner emerged the figure of a woman, lifting the smaller figure of a man to the heavens in the red wake of the rocket.

  Nadya regarded the truck from a distance, and then stepped close, tracing the lines of the illustration only centimeters away with her eyes.

  “Giorgi’s paintings are better,” she said.

  Ignatius ran her hand along the surface of the truck. “These things are produced in factories. A line of painters, each with a single brush and an individual color. The first painter paints his marks, and then the next. The whole process takes only minutes.”

  She flicked her fingernail against the metal siding. The interior of the truck resounded with a long, lone ping.

  “I don’t understand art,” she said.

  The back doors of the truck sprung open from the inside, and a woman’s face poked out, perfectly parallel to the ground.

  “What was that?” asked the woman.

  “We’re here,” said Ignatius.

  The woman’s head pulled straight back into the truck. A moment later she scrambled out into the open. Her hair was a plaited mess, strands tangled so intricately it almost seemed intentional. Her coat, dusty gray, bore wrinkles all across it, as if it had only just then been unballed from the back of a closet.

  “Is it already time?” she asked. “I slept in the truck last night.”

  “It’s almost evening,” said Ignatius. “Apparently you slept all night and day.”

  “Astronomers use the term night how you use day, and likewise the inverse. My work begins when the sun sets. My day is marked by stars.”

  The astronomer looked behind Ignatius to where Nadya and Leonid stood, and took in a deep breath. Her mouth dropped more and more open. She stumbled forward, bumping into Ignatius and then around her. The astronomer raised her hand, fingers outstretched in an unnatural way, like in the ancient portraits Leonid had seen in the Louvre. The astronomer rested her hand against Nadya’s face, letting her fingers conform to the contours of her chin and cheek. The astronomer smiled, showing a set of yellowed teeth.

  “And now the stars have come to me,” she said. “Tell me, what did you see?”

  Nadya grasped the astronomer’s wrist between the tip of her finger and the fat of her thumb and drew the astronomer’s hand down.

  “I saw the same as you,” said Nadya, “only closer.”

  Ignatius smiled at that.

  “Come, astronomer,” she said. “It’s nearing dark. Introduce us to your planetarium before the crowds arrive.”

  The sun had dipped low enough to shoot the sky through with orange. The white walls of the church went from blinding to warm, like hot glowing coals. The domes, shimmering before like agitated water, now seemed coated in melted glass.

  “Yes, yes, of course,” said the astronomer.

  She scuttled back to the truck, and turned a hand crank sprouting from the frame beside the back doors. The clacks and clanks of chains echoed from inside. The whole muraled side of the truck, hinged at the top, began to flip open. The astronomer kept cranking until the panel was at a forty
-five degree angle above vertical, like an awning hung upside down. The underside of the panel was painted flat black. Leonid thought that the effect was not much different from the factory-produced image on the opposite side.

  The astronomer began to unload items from the back of the truck. She set up a telescope—similar to the one Giorgi would pull out on clear evenings at Star City, but even larger—perched atop a tripod of thick wood. Next came a short stick, which Leonid guessed was simply a pointer. And lastly, the astronomer lifted out a small black dome and set it on the ground under the middle of the open panel. A cable ran from the back of the device to the truck, where it disappeared through the wall into the cab. The only thing left in the back was a bedroll, still crumpled from the astronomer’s afternoon somnolence.

  “There!” exclaimed the astronomer, clapping her hands as if crashing cymbals. “All done.”

  “That’s it?” asked Ignatius.

  “What more do you want?”

  “I had expected something . . . more elaborate.”

  Nadya looked through the telescope’s eyepiece, but did not adjust the focus. All she could have seen was the blurry sky, now sunk to purple. She turned the telescope to face Ignatius.

  “What are you doing?” asked Ignatius.

  “Your surprise is a rare and precious thing. I want to see it up close.”

  Leonid laughed, and then kept laughing and could not stop. The others watched him until he quieted.

  “Shut it, Leonid,” said Ignatius, her face stuck halfway between scowl and smile.

  Leonid convulsed with a few final laughs, but held them silent and inside. He kept staring at Ignatius and kept smiling until she turned away.

  “What’s next?” asked Ignatius.

  The astronomer answered, “Now we wait for dark.”

  * * *

  • • •

  THE FIRST of the crowds arrived even before the sun finished setting. These were farmers and their families, come into town specifically for the demonstration. They wore clothes the color of the earth, the same color as their deep-tanned skin. Each had donned one article or accessory that looked fancy and brand new, as if they had divided the household’s one nice outfit among the whole family. A bright white shirt here, a necktie there, a scarf, a sash, a watch colored artificially gold. These farming families stayed huddled close together. The youngest among them, children with the gnarled hands of the elderly, stared up at the church and the other tall buildings and never lowered their gazes to the familiar ground.

  Next came the residents of the town itself, factory workers and the Party-appointed managers who supervised them. Leonid was surprised to see that they dressed barely better than the farmers, in simple, shapeless clothes, the kind he remembered from his own childhood in Bohdan. The people of Moscow had adopted fashions more like those in London and Paris, not quite so flashy, but nowhere near as subdued as here. Standing all together outside the church, these people seemed a gathering of monks.

  The crowd continued to grow, the first trickle of people inflating to a steady flow, as if each side street were a branch of a river delta emptying into a sea around the old church. A sea of tired faces, but Leonid noticed excitement, too. And not just from the children, more and more of whom were being hoisted onto a parent’s shoulders for a better view. The people buzzed, like the engineers in the bunker before a launch. Leonid saw his own face throughout the crowd on cheap pins and buttons, the znachki that had been popular since Nadya’s launch. One little girl had a dozen versions of Leonid’s face stuck to her threadbare blouse. Plenty of the adults in the audience had similar displays, some with pins for each cosmonaut, arranged like the mural Giorgi had painted at Star City.

  The astronomer reached into the truck and pulled out a microphone. A wire ran from it back into the truck. Two speakers were mounted from the underside of the open panel.

  “Good evening,” said the astronomer. The speakers squealed. She reached back into the truck and twisted a knob and the feedback silenced.

  More children were hoisted onto more shoulders, joining the statue of Lenin as the highest things this side of the church. Little monuments, Leonid thought. How many people were here? Two hundred? Leonid would ask Ignatius after the event.

  “We’re here this evening,” said the astronomer, “to explore the cosmos. Soviet science has exposed the whole universe to us, and now we can bring it to you, the Soviet people. We can fit all of creation into this truck, our planetarium.”

  She reached back to the truck and flipped a switch next to the knob that had controlled the volume. The domed device on the ground emitted light through pinprick holes, casting constellations onto the black-painted underside of the open panel. Like the opposite of a film screen, Leonid thought. A spattering of applause came from the crowd, soft chatter.

  “We now know,” continued the astronomer, “that the stars are not dots of light on the firmament, but suns like our own, impossibly distant. But not as impossible as we once thought. I’m joined today by two people who have reached for the very stars and touched them. In exploring the cosmos this evening, we’ll be joined by two of our great Soviet heroes, two of our cosmonauts, the first and also the most recent.”

  The applause came in earnest, and Leonid raised his hand into a hearty wave. He did not need to think about it, the wave just happened. He wondered if his arm would start waving on its own anytime he heard clapping. Pavlov’s cosmonaut.

  Ignatius nudged Nadya, who shuffled forward and waved, too. The motion was never natural with her. Or maybe it was completely natural, while Leonid’s was absolutely false. It just appeared, to anyone looking, to be the other way around. Regardless, Nadya’s awkwardness had never hurt her. In fact, it seemed to endear her all the more to the public.

  Leonid lowered his arm and stepped back and Nadya did the same. The applause trickled out.

  The astronomer reached into the truck and flipped another switch. The dome started turning, shifting the fake stars projected on the black screen.

  “Ancient people,” she said, “used to invent gods to explain the movement of the stars. They could only see themselves as the stationary point around which the whole universe spun. It took but a few simple observations to disprove this, to show that it’s the movement of the Earth that makes the stars seem to shift so rapidly. Yes, the stars move, too, and so fast you can hardly imagine, but they’re so very, very far away that their motion is imperceptible except when measured over a long, long time. Think of how nearby trees seem to rush past the window of a train, while a distant mountain barely moves at all. Stars are millions of times more distant than that mountain.”

  A blue-gray dot, larger than the other simulated stars, crept up from the right corner of the screen. When the dot reached the center, a click came from the projector, and its motion ceased. The astronomer whipped her pointer up, rapping it against the metal screen.

  “This is Saturn, one of nine planets that orbit around our sun. Tonight, I’ll be showing you the real Saturn through our telescope”—she tapped the telescope with her pointer—“and we’ll even be able to see the planet’s majestic ring system. There are many of you this evening, so while I show each of you in turn, I’ll ask that my comrade cosmonauts answer your questions.”

  She instructed those who wished to look through the telescope to form a line, and then handed the microphone to Nadya. Nadya inspected the microphone as if it were an unfamiliar thing. She held it up, pressing it against her lips.

  “Hello,” she said, almost swallowing the microphone. Her voice boomed from the speakers, followed by a brief electric whine. She handed the microphone to Leonid.

  “What would you like to know?”

  Hands shot up throughout the crowd.

  People asked the usual questions: What was it like in outer space? What does weightlessness feel like? How is that food you eat that comes from tube
s? Were you scared? To this last question, the answer was carefully scripted: Absolutely not.

  Leonid addressed most of the questions, holding the microphone over to Nadya from time to time. Her answers were always brief, almost curt.

  Leonid pointed to an older woman—from a farm by the look of her—standing in the middle of the crowd. She had kept her hand raised the whole time, even when Nadya and Leonid were answering the questions of others.

  “I read the newspaper,” said the woman. She paused, as if that were all she planned to say. Leonid started to respond, but she continued, “I’ve read every article about you cosmonauts.”

  She paused again. This time Leonid waited. The child peering through the telescope exclaimed into the silence, “I can see Saturn’s moons!” A ripple of laughter passed through the crowd.

  The old woman continued, “I lost both my sons in the war.”

  “I’m sorry,” said Leonid. “I lost my father.” This was both true and part of the fake history the Chief Designer and Tsiolkovski had crafted for him.

  “Then how can you say in interviews that there’s no god? That there’s no heaven? When they used to let us come to church here, the priest always told us about heaven. My mother always told me that if I was good I’d go to heaven. And that’s how I raised my boys. What’s the point of being good if what you say is true?”

  “Science has explained things better than religion ever did,” said Leonid, quoting directly from the list of potential questions and answers Ignatius had made him memorize.

  “But where are my boys?” asked the woman, her voice heavy with pleading. “They were good, good boys. Where do the good ones go?”

  There was another line Leonid was supposed to say at this point, but it caught in his throat. He stammered. His brother, the good one, literally gone to the heavens. He imagined that this woman was his own grandmother, begging for answers from the soldiers after Tsiolkovski had taken him and his brother away. He said several more disconnected syllables, unable to string them into words.