Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 100

by Aliette de Bodard

  “Bigger than Western Europe,” said Gennady. “Ever heard of it?”

  “Of course I’ve heard of it,” said the youth testily—but Gennady could see from how he kept his eyes fixed in front of him that he was still frantically reading about the town from some website or other. The wan August sunlight revealed him to be taller than Gennady, pale, with stringy hair, and everything about him soft—a sculpture done in rounded corners. He had a wide face, though; he might pass for Russian. Gennady clapped him on the shoulder. “Let me do the talking,” he said as they dragged themselves across the blistering tarmac to the terminal building.

  “So,” said Ambrose, scratching his neck. “Why are we here?”

  “You’re here because you’re with me. And you needed to disappear, but that doesn’t mean I stop working.”

  Gennady glanced around. The landscape here should look a lot like home, which was only a day’s drive to the west—and here indeed was that vast sky he remembered from Ukraine. After that first glance, though, he did a double-take. The dry prairie air normally smelled of dust and grass at this time of year, and there should have been yellow grass from here to the flat horizon—but instead the land seemed blasted, with large patches of bare soil showing. There was only stubble where there should have been grass. It looked more like Australia than Asia. Even the trees ringing the airport were dead, just gray skeletons clutching the air.

  He thought about climate change as they walked through the concrete-floored terminal; since they’d cleared customs in Amsterdam, the bored-looking clerks here just waved them through. “Hang on,” said Ambrose as he tried to keep up with Gennady’s impatient stride. “I came to you guys for asylum. Doesn’t that mean you put me up somewhere, some hotel, you know, away from the action?”

  “You can’t get any farther from the action than this.” They emerged onto a boulevard that had grass, though it hadn’t been watered nor cut in a long while; the civilized lawn merged imperceptibly with the wild prairie. There was nothing visible from here to the horizon, except in one direction where a cluster of listless windmills jutted above some low trees.

  A single taxicab was sitting at the crumbled curb.

  “Oh, man,” said Ambrose.

  Gennady had to smile. “You were expecting some Black Sea resort, weren’t you?” He slipped into the taxi, which stank of hot vinyl and motor oil. “Any car rental agency,” he said to the driver in Russian. “It’s not like you’re some Cold War defector,” he continued to Ambrose in English. “Your benefactor is the U.N. And they don’t have much money.”

  “So you’re what—putting me up in a motel in Kazakhstan?” Ambrose struggled to put his outrage into words. “What I saw could—”

  “What?” They pulled away from the curb and became the only car on a cracked blacktop road leading into town.

  “Can’t tell you,” mumbled Ambrose, suddenly looking shifty. “I was told not to tell you anything.”

  Gennady swore in Ukrainian and looked away. They drove in silence for a while, until Ambrose said, “So why are you here, then? Did you piss somebody off?”

  Gennady smothered the urge to push Ambrose out of the cab. “Can’t tell you,” he said curtly.

  “Does it involve SNOPB?” Ambrose pronounced it ‘snop-bee.’

  Gennady would have been startled had he not known Ambrose was connected to the net via his glasses. “You show me yours, I’ll show you mine,” he said. Ambrose snorted in contempt.

  They didn’t speak for the rest of the drive.

  “Let me get this straight,” said Gennady later that evening. “He says he’s being chased by Russian agents, NASA—and Google?”

  On the other end of the line, Eleanor Frankl sighed. “I’m sorry we dumped him on you at the airport,” said the New York director of the International Atomic Energy Agency. She was Gennady’s boss for this new and—so far—annoyingly vague contract. “There just wasn’t time to explain why we were sending him with you to Kazakhstan,” she added.

  “So explain now.” He was pacing in the grass in front of the best hotel his IAEA stipend could afford. It was evening and the crickets were waking up; to the west, fantastically huge clouds had piled up, their tops still lit golden as the rest of the sky faded into mauve. It was cooling off already.

  “Right . . . Well, first of all, it seems he really is being chased by the Russians, but not by the country. It’s the Soviet Union Online that’s after him. And the only place their IP addresses are blocked is inside the geographical territories of the Russian and Kazakhstani Republics.”

  “So, let me get this straight,” said Gennady heavily. “Poor Ambrose is being chased by Soviet agents. He ran to the U.N. rather than the FBI, and to keep him safe you decided to transport him to the one place in the world that is free of Soviet influence. Which is Russia.”

  “Exactly,” said Frankl brightly. “And you’re escorting him because your contract is taking you there anyway. No other reason.”

  “No, no, it’s fine. Just tell me what the hell I’m supposed to be looking for at SNOPB. The place was a God-damned anthrax factory. I’m a radiation specialist.”

  He heard Frankl take a deep breath, and then she said, “Two years ago, an unknown person or persons hacked into a Los Alamos server and stole the formula for an experimental metastable explosive. Now we have a paper trail and emails that have convinced us that a metastable bomb is being built. You know what this means?”

  Gennady leaned against the wall of the hotel, suddenly feeling sick. “The genie is finally out of the bottle.”

  “If it’s true, Gennady, then everything we’ve worked for has come to naught. Because as of now, anybody in the world who wants a nuclear bomb, can make one.”

  He didn’t know what to say, so he just stared out at the steppe, thinking about a world where hydrogen bombs were as easy to get as TNT. His whole life’s work would be rendered pointless—and all arms treaties, the painstaking work of generations to put the nuclear nightmare back in its bottle. The nuclear threat had been containable when it was limited to governments and terrorists—but now, the threat was from everybody . . .

  Eleanor’s distant voice snapped him back to attention. “Here’s the thing, Gennady: we don’t know very much about this group that’s building the metastable weapon. By luck we’ve managed to decrypt a few emails from one party, so we know a tiny bit—a minimal bit—about the design of the bomb. It seems to be based on one of the biggest of the weapons ever tested at Semipalatinsk—its code name was the Tsarina.”

  “The Tsarina?” Gennady whistled softly. “That was a major, major test. Underground, done in 1968. Ten megatonnes—lifted the whole prairie two meters and dropped it. Killed about a thousand cattle from the ground shock. Scared the hell out of the Americans, too.”

  “Yes, and we’ve discovered that some of the Tsarina’s components were made at the Stepnogorsk Scientific Experimental and Production Base. In Building 242.”

  “But SNOPB was a biological facility, not nuclear. How can this possibly be connected?”

  “We don’t know how, yet. Listen, Gennady, I know it’s a thin lead. After you’re done at the SNOPB, I want you to drive out to Semipalatinsk and investigate the Tsarina site.”

  “Hmmph.” Part of Gennady was deeply annoyed. Part was relieved that he wouldn’t be dealing with any IAEA or Russian nuclear staff in the near future. Truth to tell, stalking around the Kazaki grasslands was a lot more appealing than dealing with the political shit-storm that would hit when this all went public.

  But speaking of people . . . He glanced up at the hotel’s one lighted window. With a grimace he pocketed his augmented reality glasses and went up to the room.

  Ambrose was sprawled on one of the narrow beds. He had the TV on and was watching a Siberian ski-adventure infomercial. “Well?” he said as Gennady sat on the other bed and dragged his shoes off.

  “Tour of secret Soviet anthrax factory. Tomorrow, after Egg McMuffins.”

  “
Yay,” said Ambrose with apparent feeling. “Do I get to wear a hazmat suit?”

  “Not this time.” Gennady lay back, then saw that Ambrose was staring at him with an alarmed look on his face. “Is fine,” he said, waggling one hand at the boy. “Only one underground bunker we’re interested in, and they probably never used it. The place never went into full production, you know.”

  “Meaning it only made a few hundred pounds of anthrax per day instead of the full ton it was designed for! I should feel reassured?”

  Gennady stared at the uneven ceiling. “Is an adventure.” He must be tired, his English was slipping.

  “This sucks.” Ambrose crossed his arms and glowered at the TV.

  Gennady thought for a while. “So what did you do to piss off Google so much? Drive the rover off a cliff?” Ambrose didn’t answer, and Gennady sat up. “You found something. On Mars.”

  “No, that’s ridiculous,” said Ambrose. “That’s not it at all.”

  “Huh.” Gennady lay down again. “Still, I think I’d enjoy it. Even if it wasn’t in real-time . . . driving on Mars. That would be cool.”

  “That sucked too.”

  “Really? I would have thought it would be fun, seeing all those places emerge from low-res satellite into full hi-res 3-D.”

  But Ambrose shook his head. “That’s not how it worked. That’s the point. I couldn’t believe my luck when I won the contest, you know? I thought it’d be like being the first man on Mars, only I wouldn’t have to leave my living room. But the whole point of the rover was to go into terrain that hadn’t been photographed from the ground before. And with the time-delay on signals to Mars, I wasn’t steering it in real time. I’d drive in fast-forward mode over low-res pink hills that looked worse than a forty-year-old video game, then upload the drive sequence and log off. The rover’d get the commands twenty minutes later and drive overnight, then download the results. By that time it was the next day and I had to enter the next path. Rarely had time to even look at where we’d actually gone the day before.”

  Gennady considered. “A bit disappointing. But still—more than most people ever get.”

  “More than anyone else will ever get.” Ambrose scowled. “That’s what was so awful about it. You wouldn’t understand.”

  “Oh?” Gennady arched an eyebrow. “We who grew up in the old Soviet Union know a little about disappointment.”

  Ambrose looked mightily uncomfortable. “I grew up in Washington. Capital of the world! But my dad went from job to job, we were pretty poor. So every day I could see what you could have, you know, the Capital dome, the Mall, all that power and glory . . . what they could have—but not me. Never me. So I used to imagine a future where there was a whole new world where I could be . . . ”

  “Important?”

  He shrugged. “Something like that. NASA used to tell us they were just about to go to Mars, any day now, and I wanted that. I dreamed about homesteading on Mars.” He looked defensive; but Gennady understood the romance of it. He just nodded.

  “Then when I was twelve the Pakistani-Indian war happened and they blew up each other’s satellites. All that debris from the explosions is going to be up there for centuries! You can’t get a manned spacecraft through that cloud, it’s like shrapnel. Hell, they haven’t even cleared low Earth orbit to restart the orbital tourist industry. I’ll never get to really go there! None of us will. We’re never gettin’ off this sinkhole.”

  Gennady scowled at the ceiling. “I hope you’re wrong.”

  “Welcome to the life of the last man to drive on Mars.” Ambrose dragged the tufted covers back from the bed. “Instead of space, I get a hotel in Kazakhstan. Now let me sleep. It’s about a billion o’clock in the morning, my time.”

  He was soon snoring, but Gennady’s alarm over the prospect of a metastable bomb had him fully awake. He put on his AR glasses and reviewed the terrain around SNOPB, but much of the satellite footage was old and probably out of date. Ambrose was right: nobody was putting up satellites these days if they could help it.

  Little had probably changed at the old factory, though, and it was a simple enough place. Planning where to park and learning where Building 242 was hadn’t reduced his anxiety at all, so on impulse he switched his view to Mars. The sky changed color—from pure blue to butterscotch—but otherwise, the landscape looked disturbingly similar. There were a lot more rocks on Mars, and the dirt was red, but the emptiness, the slow rolling monotony of the plain and stillness were the same, as if he’d stepped into a photograph. (Well, he actually had, but he knew there would be no more motion in this scene were he there.) He commanded the viewpoint to move, and for a time strolled, alone, in Ambrose’s footsteps—or rather, the ruts of Google’s rover. Humans had done this in their dreams for thousands of years, yet Ambrose was right—this place was, in the end, no more real than those dreams.

  Russia’s cosmonauts had still been romantic idols when he was growing up. In photos they had stood with their heads high, minds afire with plans to stride over the hills of the moon and Mars. Gennady pictured them in the years after the Soviet Union’s collapse, when they still had jobs, but no budget or destination any more. Where had their dreams taken them?

  The Baikonur spaceport was south of here. Instead of space, in the end they’d also had to settle for a hard bed in Kazakhstan.

  In the morning they drove out to the old anthrax site in a rented Tata sedan. The fields around Stepnogorsk looked like they’d been glared at by God, except where bright blue dew-catcher fencing ran in rank after rank across the stubble. “What’re those?” asked Ambrose, pointing; this was practically the first thing he’d said since breakfast.

  In the rubble-strewn field of what had once been SNOPB, several small windmills were twirling atop temporary masts. Below them were some shipping-container sized boxes with big grills in their sides. The site looked healthier than the surrounding prairie; there were actual green trees in the distance. Of course, this area had been wetlands and there’d been a creek running behind SNOPB; maybe it was still here, which was a hopeful sign.

  “Headquarters told me that some kind of climate research group is using the site,” he told Ambrose as he pulled up and stopped the car. “But it’s still public land.”

  “They built an anthrax factory less than five minutes outside of town?” Ambrose shook his head, whether in wonder or disgust, Gennady couldn’t tell. They got out of the car, and Ambrose looked around in obvious disappointment. “Wow, it’s gone gone.” He seemed stunned by the vastness of the landscape. Only a few foundation walls now stuck up out of the cracked lots where the anthrax factory had once stood, except for where the big box machines sat whirring and humming. They were near where the bunkers had been; so, with a frown of curiosity, Gennady strolled in that direction. Ambrose followed, muttering to himself. “ . . . Last update must have been ten years ago.” He had his glasses on, so he was probably comparing the current view to what he could see online.

  According to Gennady’s notes, the bunkers had been grass-covered buildings with two-meter thick walls, designed to withstand a nuclear blast. In the 1960s and 70s they’d contained ranks of cement vats where the anthrax was grown. Those had been cracked and filled in, and the heavy doors removed; but it would have been too much work to fill the bunkers in entirely. He poked his nose into the first in line—Building 241—and saw a flat stretch of water leading into darkness. “Excellent. This job just gets worse. We may be wading.”

  “But what are you looking for?”

  “I—oh.” As he rounded the mound of Building 242, a small clutch of hummers and trucks came into view. They’d been invisible from the road. There was still no sign of anybody, so he headed for Bunker 242. As he was walking down the crumbled ramp to the massive doors, he heard the unmistakable sound of a rifle-bolt being slipped. “Better not go in there,” somebody said in Russian.

  He looked carefully up and to his left. A young woman had come over the top of the mound. She was hold
ing the rifle, and she had it aimed directly at Gennady.

  “What are you doing here?” she said. She had a local accent.

  “Exploring, is all,” said Gennady. “We’d heard of the old anthrax factory, and thought we’d take a look at it. This is public land.”

  She swore, and Gennady heard footsteps behind him. Ambrose looked deeply frightened as two large men—also carrying rifles—emerged from behind a plastic membrane that had been stretched across the bunker’s doorway. Both men wore bright yellow fireman’s masks, and had air tanks on their backs.

  “When are your masters going to believe that we’re doing what we say?” said the woman. “Come on.” She gestured with her rifle for Gennady and Ambrose to walk down the ramp.

  “We’re dead, we’re dead,” whimpered Ambrose. He was shivering.

  “If you really must have your proof, then put these on.” She nodded to the two men, who stripped off their masks and tanks and handed them to Gennady and Ambrose. They pushed past the plastic membrane and into the bunker.

  The place was full of light: a crimson, blood-red radiance that made the sight of what was inside all the more bizarre.

  “Oh shit,” muttered Ambrose. “It’s a grow-op.”

  The long, low space was filled from floor to ceiling with plants. Surrounded them on tall stands were hundreds of red LED lamp banks. In the lurid light, the plants appeared black. He squinted at the nearest, fully expecting to see a familiar, jagged-leaf profile. Instead—

  “Tomatoes?”

  “Two facts for you,” said the woman, her voice muffled. She’d set down her rifle, and now held up two fingers. “One: we’re not stepping on anybody else’s toes here. We are not competing with you. And two: this bunker is designed to withstand a twenty kilotonne blast. If you think you can muscle your way in here and take it over, you’re sadly mistaken.”