Clarkesworld Magazine Issue 100

by Aliette de Bodard

  He helped Egorov through the window then, after making sure no one was looking, left through the hotel’s front door. The unmistakable silhouette of Egorov was limping into the parking lot. Gennady followed him and, as he unlocked the Tata, he said, “I’ve disabled the GPS tracking in this car. It’s a rental; I’m going to drop it off in Semey, which is six hundred kilometers from here. Are you sure you’re up to a drive like that?”

  The old man’s eyes glinted under yellow street light. “Never thought I’d get a chance to see the steppes again. Let’s go!”

  Gennady felt a ridiculous surge of adrenalin as they bumped out of the parking lot. Two cars were on the road, and endless blackness swallowed the landscape beyond the edge of town. It was a simple matter to swing onto the highway and leave Stepnogorsk behind—but it felt like a car chase.

  “Ha ha!” Egorov craned his neck to look back at the dwindling town lights. “Semey, eh? You’re going to Semipalatinsk, aren’t you?”

  “To look at the Tsarina site, yes. Whose side does that put me on?”

  “Sides?” Egorov crossed his arms and glared out the windshield. “I don’t know about sides.”

  “It was an honest question.”

  “I believe you. But I don’t know. Except for them,” he added, jabbing a thumb back at the town. “I know they’re bad guys.”

  “Why? And why are they interested in Ambrose?”

  “Same reason we are. Because of what he saw.”

  Gennady took a deep breath. “Okay. Why don’t you just tell me what you know? And I’ll do the same?”

  “Yes, all right.” The utter blackness of the night-time steppe had swallowed them; all that was visible was the double-cone of roadway visible in the car’s headlamps. It barely changed, moment to moment, giving the drive a timelessness Gennady would, under other circumstances, have quite enjoyed.

  “We data-mine records from the Soviet era,” began Egorov. “To find out what really went on. It’s lucrative business, and it supports the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Online.” He tapped his glasses.

  “Well, a few weeks ago, we got a request for some of the old data—from the Americans. Two requests, actually, a day apart: one from the search engine company, and the other from the government. We were naturally curious, so we didn’t say no; but we did a little digging into the data ourselves. —That is, we’d started to, when those young, grim men burst into our offices and confiscated the server. And the backup.”

  Gennady looked askance at him. “Really? Where was this?”

  “Um. Seattle. That’s where the CCCOP is based—only because we’ve been banned in the old country! Russia’s run by robber barons today, they have no regard for the glory of—”

  “Yes yes. Did you find out what they were looking for?”

  “Yes—which is how I ended up with these travel companions you saw. They are in the pay of the American CIA.”

  “Yes, but why? What does this have to do with the Tsarina?”

  “I was hoping you could tell me. All we found was appropriations for strange things that should never have had anything to do with a nuclear test. Before the Tsarina was set off, there was about a year of heavy construction at the site. Sometimes, you know, they built fake towns to blow them up and examine the blast damage. That’s what I thought at first; they ordered thousands of tonnes of concrete, rebar and asbestos, that sort of thing. But if you look at the records after the test, there’s no sign of where any of that material went.”

  “They ordered some sort of agricultural crop from SNOPB,” Gennady ventured. Egorov nodded.

  “None of the discrepancies would ever have been noticed if not for your friend and whatever it is he found. What was it, anyway?”

  A strange suspicion had begun to form in Gennady’s mind, but it was so unlikely that he shook his head. “I want to look at the Tsarina site,” he said. “Maybe that’ll tell us.”

  Egorov was obviously unsatisfied with that answer, but he said nothing, merely muttering and trying to get himself comfortable in the Tata’s bucket seat. After a while, just as the hum of the dark highway was starting to hypnotize Gennady, Egorov said, “It’s all gone to hell, you know.”

  “Hmm?”

  “Russia. It was hard in the old days, but at least we had our pride.” He turned to look out the black window. “After 1990, all the life just went out of the place. Lower birthrate, men drinking themselves to death by the age of forty . . . no ambition, no hope. A lost land.”

  “You left?”

  “Physically, yes.” Egorov darted a look at Gennady. “You never leave. Not a place like this. For many years now, I’ve struggled with how to bring back Russia’s old glory—our sense of pride. Yet the best I was ever able to come up with was an online environment. A game.” He spat the word contemptuously.

  Gennady didn’t reply, but he knew how Egorov felt. Ukraine had some of the same problems—the listless lack of direction, the loss of confidence . . . It wasn’t getting any better here. He thought of the blasted steppes they were passing through, rendered unlivable by global warming. There had been massive forest fires in Siberia this year, and the Gobi desert was expanding north and west, threatening the Kazaks even as the Caspian sea dwindled down to nothing.

  He thought of SNOPB. “They’re gone,” he said, “but they left their trash behind.” Toxic, decaying: nuclear submarines heeled over in the waters off of Murmansk, nitrates soaking the soil around the launch pads of Baikonur. The ghosts of old Soviets prowled this dark, in the form of radiation in the groundwater, mutations in the forest, and poisons in the dust clouds that were all too common these days. Gennady had spent his whole adult life cleaning up the mess, and before yesterday he’d been able to tell himself that it was working—that all the worst nightmares were from the past. The metastables had changed that, in one stroke rendering all the old fears laughable in comparison.

  “Get some sleep,” he told Egorov. “We’re going to be driving all night.”

  “I don’t sleep much anymore.” But the old man stopped talking, and just stared ahead. He couldn’t be visiting his online People’s Republic through his glasses, because those IP addresses were blocked here. But maybe he saw it all anyway—the brave young men in their trucks, heading to the Semipalatinsk site to witness a nuclear blast; the rail yards where parts for the giant moon rocket, doomed to explode on the pad, were mustering . . . With his gaze fixed firmly on the past, he seemed the perfect opposite of Ambrose with his American dreams of a new world unburdened by history, whose red dunes marched to a pure and mysterious horizon.

  The first living thing in space had been the Russian dog Laika. She had died in orbit—had never come home. If he glanced out at the star-speckled sky, Gennady could almost see her ghost racing eternally through the heavens, beside the dead dream of planetary conquest, of flags planted in alien soil and shining domes on the hills of Mars.

  They arrived at the Tsarina site at 4:30: dawn, at this latitude and time of year. The Semipalatinsk Polygon was bare, flat, blasted scrubland: Mars with tufts of dead weed. The irony was that it hadn’t been the hundreds of nuclear bombs set off here that had killed the land; even a decade after the Polygon was closed, the low rolling hills had been covered with a rich carpet of waving grass. Instead, it was the savage turn of the climate, completely unpredicted by the KGB and the CIA, that had killed the steppe.

  The road into the Polygon was narrow blacktop with no real shoulder, no ditches, and no oncoming traffic—though a set of lights had faded in and out of view in the rearview mirror all through the drive. Gennady would have missed the turnoff to the Tsarina site had his glasses not beeped.

  There had been a low wire fence here at one time, but nobody had kept it up. He drove straight over the fallen gate, which was becoming one with the soil, and up a low rise to the crest of the water-filled crater. There he parked and got out.

  Egorov climbed out too and stretched cautiously. “Beautiful,” he said, gazing into the
epic sunrise. “Is it radioactive here?”

  “Oh, a little . . . That’s odd.”

  “What?”

  Gennady had looked at the satellite view of the site on the way here; it was clear, standing here in person, that that vertical perspective lied. “The Tsarina was supposed to be an underground test. You usually get some subsidence of the ground in a circle around the test site. And with the big ground shots, you would get a crater, like Lake Chagan,” he nodded to the east. “But this . . . this is a hole.”

  Egorov spat into it. “It certainly is.” The walls of the Tsarina crater were sheer and went down a good fifty feet to black water. The “crater” wasn’t round, either, but square, and it wasn’t nearly big enough to be the result of a surface explosion. If he hadn’t known it was the artifact of a bomb blast, Gennady would have sworn he was looking at a flooded quarry.

  Gennady gathered his equipment and began combing the grass around the site. After a minute he found some twisted chunks of concrete and metal, and knelt down to inspect them.

  Egorov came up behind him. “What are you looking for?”

  “Serial numbers.” He quickly found some old, grayed stenciling on a half-buried tank made of greenish metal. “You’ll understand what I’m doing,” he said as he pinched the arm of his glasses to take a snapshot. “I’m checking our database . . . Hmpf.”

  “What is it?” Egorov shifted from foot to foot. He was glancing around, as if afraid they might be interrupted.

  “This piece came from the smaller of the installations here. The one the Americans called URDF-3.”

  “URDF?” Egorov blinked at him.

  “Stands for ‘Unidentified Research and Development Facility.’ The stuff they built there scared the Yankees even more than the H-bomb . . . ”

  He stood up, frowning, and slowly turned to look at the entire site. “Something’s been bothering me,” he said as he walked to the very edge of the giant pit.

  “What’s that?” Egorov was hanging back.

  “Ambrose told me he saw a pyramid on Mars. It said CCCP on its side. That was all; so he knew it was Russian, and so did Google and the CIA when they found out about it. And you, too.

  “But that’s all anybody knew. So who made the connection between the pyramid and the Tsarina?”

  Egorov didn’t reply. Gennady turned and found that the old man had drawn himself up very straight, and had leveled a small, nasty-looking pistol at him.

  “You didn’t follow us to Stepnogorsk,” said Gennady. “You were already there.”

  “Take off your glasses,” said Egorov. “Carefully, so I can be sure you’re not snapping another picture.”

  As Gennady reached up to comply he felt the soft soil at the lip of the pit start to crumble. “Ah, can we—” It was too late, he toppled backward, arms flailing.

  He had an instant’s choice: roll down the slope, or jump and hope he’d hit the water. He jumped.

  The cold hit him so hard that at first he thought he’d been shot. Swearing and gasping, he surfaced, but when he spotted Egorov’s silhouette at the crest of the pit, dove again.

  Morning sunlight was just tipping into the water. At first Gennady thought the wall of the pit was casting a dark shadow across the sediment below him. Gradually he realized the truth: there was no bottom to this shaft. At least, none within easy diving distance.

  He swam to the opposite side; he couldn’t stay down here, he’d freeze. Defeated, he flung himself out of the freezing water onto hard clay that was probably radioactive. Rolling over, he looked up.

  Egorov stood on the lip of the pit. Next to him was a young woman with a rifle in her hands.

  Gennady sat up. “Shit.”

  Kyzdygoi slung the rifle over her back, then clambered down the slope to the shore. As she picked her way over to Gennady she said, “How much do you know?”

  “Everything,” he said between coughs. “I know everything. Where’s Ambrose?”

  “He’s safe,” she said. “He’ll be fine.”

  Then she waited, rifle cradled. “You’re here,” he said reluctantly, “which tells me that -3 was funded by the Soviets. Your job was never to clean up the Earth—it was to design life support and agricultural systems for a Mars colony.”

  Her mouth twitched, but she didn’t laugh. “How could we possibly get to Mars? The sky’s a shooting gallery.”

  “ . . . And that would be a problem if you were going up there in a dinky little aluminum can, like cosmonauts always did.” He stood up, joints creaking from the cold. He was starting to shiver deeply and it was hard to speak past his chattering teeth. “B-but if you rode a c-concrete bunker into orbit, you could ignore the shrapnel c-completely. In fact, that would be the only way you could d-do it.”

  “Come now. How could something like that ever get off the ground?”

  “The same way the Tsarina d-did.” He nodded at the dark surface of the flooded shaft. “The Americans had their P-project Orion. The Soviets had a similar program based at URDF-3. Both had discovered that an object could be just a few meters away from a nuclear explosion, and if it was made of the right materials it wouldn’t be destroyed—it would be shot away like a bullet from a gun. The Americans designed a spaceship that would drop atomic bombs out the back and ride the explosions to orbit. But the Tsarina wasn’t like that . . . it was just one bomb, and a d-deep shaft, and a pyramid-shaped spaceship to ride that explosion. That design’s something called a Verne gun.”

  “And who else knows this?”

  He hesitated. “N-no one,” he admitted. “I didn’t know until I saw the shaft just now. The p-pyramid was fitted into the mouth of it, right about where we’re s-standing. That’s why this doesn’t look like any other bomb crater on Earth.”

  “Let’s go,” she said, gesturing with the rifle. “You’re turning blue.”

  “Y-you’re not going t-to sh-shoot me?”

  “There’s no need,” she said gently. “In a few days, the whole world will know what we’ve done.”

  Gennady finished taping aluminum foil to the trailer’s window. Taking a push-pin from the cork board by the door, he carefully pricked a single tiny hole in the foil.

  It was night, and crickets were chirping outside. Gennady wasn’t tied up—in fact, he was perfectly free to leave—but on his way out the door Egorov had said, “I wouldn’t go outside in the next hour or so. After that . . . well, wait for the dust to settle.”

  They’d driven him about fifty kilometers to the south and into an empty part of the Polygon. When Gennady had asked why this place, Egorov had laughed. “The Soviets set off their bombs here because this was the last empty place on Earth. It’s still the last empty place, and that’s why we’re here.”

  There was nothing here but the withered steppe, a hundred or so trucks, vans and buses, and the cranes, tanks and pole-sheds of a temporary construction site. —And, towering over the sheds, a gray concrete pyramid.

  “A Verne gun fires its cargo into orbit in a single shot,” Egorov had told Gennady. “It generates thousands of gravities worth of acceleration—enough to turn you into a smear on the floor. That’s why the Soviets couldn’t send any people; they hadn’t figured out how to set off a controlled sequence of little bombs. The Americans never perfected that either. They didn’t have the computational power to do the simulations.

  “So they sent everything but the people. Two hundred eighty thousand tonnes in one shot, to Mars.”

  Bulldozers and cranes, fuel tanks, powdered cement, bags of seeds and food, space suits, even a complete, dismantled nuclear reactor: the Tsarina had included everything potential colonists might need on a new world. Its builders knew it had gone up, knew it had gotten to Mars; but they didn’t know where it had landed, or whether it had landed intact.

  A day after his visit to the Tsarina site, Gennady had sat outside this trailer with Egorov, Kyzdygoi and a few other officials of the new Soviet. They’d drunk a few beers and talked about the plan. “When
our data-mining turned up the Tsarina’s manifest, it was like a light from heaven,” Egorov had said, his hands opening eloquently in the firelight. “Suddenly we saw what was possible, how to revive our people—all the world’s people—around a new hope, after all hope had gone. Something that would combine Apollo and Trinity into one event, and suddenly both would take on the meaning they always needed to have.”

  Egorov had started a crash program to build an Orion rocket. They couldn’t get fissionable materials—Gennady and his people had locked those up tightly and for all time. But the metastables promised a different approach.

  “We hoped the Tsarina was on Mars and intact, but we didn’t know for sure, until Ambrose leaked his pictures.”

  The new Tsarina would use a series of small, clean fusion blasts to lift off and, at the far end, to land again. Thanks to Ambrose, they knew where the Tsarina was. It didn’t matter that the Americans did too; nobody else had a plan to get there.

  “And by the time they get their acts together, we’ll have built a city,” said Kyzdygoi. She was wide-eyed with the power of the idea. “Because we’re not going there two at a time, like Noah in his Ark. We’re all going.” And she swung her arm to indicate the hundreds of campfires burning all around them, where thousands of men, women and children, hand-picked from among the citizens of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics Online, waited to amaze the world.

  Gennady hunkered down in a little fort he’d built out of seat cushions, and waited.

  It was like a camera flash, and a second later there was a second, then a third, and then the whole trailer bounced into the air and everything Gennady’s hadn’t tied down went tumbling. The windows shattered and he landed on cushions and found himself staring across suddenly open air at the immolation of the building site.

  The flickering flashes continued, coming from above now. The pyramid was gone, and the cranes and heavy machinery lay tumbled like a child’s toys, all burning.

  Flash. Flash.

  It was really happening.

  Flash. Flash. Flash . . .