But he never lets me be there for him, she thought as she jacked into the Net and called him.
Though she didn’t intend to, when he finally answered the first thing she said was, “You promised you’d call.”
“You too? Merrick just chewed me out for yesterday.” He seemed listless.
“Credit me with better motives than Merrick,” she said. She wanted to pursue it, but knowing how testy he could be, just said, “What happened?”
“It’s not like I’m having a picnic out here, you know. It’s just not so easy to stay in touch as I thought.” He looked like he hadn’t slept well, or maybe had slept too well.
“Listen, I’m sorry,” he said suddenly, and he sounded sincere. “I’m touched that you care so much about me.”
“Of course I do, Gennady. We’ve been through a lot together.” It was rare for him to admit he was wrong; somewhat mollified, she said, “I just need to know what’s going on.”
He sighed. “I think I have something for you.” She perked up. Lisa loved it when they worked together as a team. He was the slow, plodding investigator, used to sifting through reams of photographs, old deeds and the like. She was the talker, the one who ferreted out people’s secrets by talking with them. When they’d met, Gennady had been a shy insurance investigator unwilling to take any job where he had to interview people, and she had been a nosy hacker who got her hands dirty with field work. They made a perfect match, she often thought, because they were so fundamentally different.
“There’s an old man who lives here,” said Gennady. “Name’s Bogoliubov. Has a dacha near the reactor.”
“That’s insane,” she said.
Gennady merely shrugged. “That’s where I was yesterday – talking to him. He says nobody’s come through Pripyat in ages. Except for one guy.”
“Oh?” She leaned forward eagerly.
“We had a long talk, Bogoliubov and me.” Gennady half-smiled at some private joke. “He says he met a guy named Yevgeny Druschenko. Part-time employee of the Trust, or so he said.” As he spoke Lisa was typing madly at her terminal. “He was a regular back when they still had funding to do groundwater studies here. The thing is, he’s driven into town twice in the past year. Didn’t tell Bogoliubov where he was going, but the old man says both times he headed for the sarcophagus with a truckload of stuff. Crates. Bogoliubov doesn’t know where they ended up.”
“Bingo!” Lisa made a triumphant fist. “He’s listed, all right. But he’s not on the payroll any more.”
“There’s more.” She looked at him, eyebrows raised. Gennady grinned. “You’re going to love this part. Bogoliubov says it was right after Druschenko’s first visit that the dragon appeared.”
“Whoa. Dragon?”
“He doesn’t know what else to call it. I don’t think he believes it’s supernatural. But he says something is living inside the sarcophagus. Been there for months now.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“I know. It’s fatal just to walk past the thing.”
Lisa scowled for a minute, then dismissed the issue with a wave of her hand. “Whatever. I’m going to trace this Druschenko. Are you through there now?”
“Not quite. Bogoliubov might be lying. I have to check the rest of the town, see if there’s any signs of life. Should take a couple of days.”
“Hmmf.” She was sure he knew what she felt about that. “Okay. But keep in touch. I mean it this time.”
He placed a hand on his heart solemnly. “I promise.”
It was hard. For the next several mornings Gennady awoke to find Bogoliubov waiting for him downstairs. The old man had designated himself tour guide, and proceeded to drag Gennady through bramble, fen and buckled asphalt, ensuring he visited all the high points of the city.
There was a spot where two adjacent apartment blocks had collapsed together, forming a ten-storey arch under which Bogoliubov walked whistling. In another neighbourhood, the old man had restored several exquisite houses, and they paused to refresh themselves there by a spring that was miraculously clean of radiation.
What Bogoliubov saw here was nature cleansing a wound. Gennady could never completely forget the tragedy of this place; the signs of hasty abandonment were everywhere, and his imagination filled in vistas of buses and queues of people clutching what they could carry, joking nervously about what they were told would be a temporary evacuation. Thinking about it too long made him angry, and he didn’t want to be angry in a place that had become so beautiful. Bogoliubov had found his own solution to that by forgetting that this was ever a place of Man.
Gennady was suspicious that the old man might be trying to distract him, so he made a point of going out on his own to explore as well. It was tiring, but he had to verify Bogoliubov’s story before he could feel he had done his job. Calling Merrick or Lisa was becoming difficult because he was out so much, and so tired from walking – but as well, he found himself increasingly moving in a meditative state. He had to give himself a shake, practically learn to speak again, before he could make a call.
To combat this feeling he spent his evenings in the Net, listening to the thrum of humanity’s great chorus. Even there, however, he felt more an observer. Maybe that was okay; he had always been like this, it was just cities and obligations that drove him out of his natural habits.
Then one night he awoke to the sound of engines.
It was pitch-dark and for a second he didn’t know where he was. Gennady sat up and focused on the lunar rectangle of the living room window. For a moment he heard nothing, then the grumble started up again. He thought he saw a flicker of light outside.
He staggered to the balcony where he had set up his good telescope. The sound was louder here. Like an idling train, more felt than heard. It seemed to slide around in the air, the way train sounds did when they were coming from kilometres distant.
Light broke around a distant street corner. Gennady swung the telescope around and nearly had it focused when something large and black lurched through his visual field, and was gone again. When he looked up from the lens he saw no sign of it.
He took the stairs two at a time, flashlight beam dodging wildly ahead of him. When he got to the lobby he switched it off and stepped cautiously to the front doors. His heart was pounding.
Gennady watched for a while, then ventured out into the street. It wasn’t hard to hide here; any second he could drop in the tall grass or step behind a stand of young trees. So he made his way in the direction of the sound.
It took ten minutes to reach the spot where he’d seen the light. He dropped to one knee at the side of a filling station, and poked his head around the corner. The street was empty.
The whole intersection had been overtaken with weeds and young birch trees. He puzzled over the sight for a minute, then stood and walked out into their midst. There was absolutely nowhere here that you could drive a truck without knocking over lots of plants. But nothing was disturbed.
It was silent there now. Gennady had never ventured this far in the dark; the great black slabs of the buildings were quite unnerving. Shielding the light with one hand, he used the flashlight to try to find some tracks.
There were none.
On impulse he unslung the Geiger counter and switched it on. It immediately began chattering. For a few minutes he criss-crossed the intersection, finding a definite line of higher radioactivity bisecting it. He crouched on that line, and moved along it like he was weeding a garden, holding the counter close to the ground.
As the chattering peaked he spotted a black divot in the ground. He shone the flashlight on it. It was a deep W-shaped mark, of the sort made by the feet of back-hoes and cranes. A few metres beyond it he found another. Both were incredibly hot.
A deep engine pulse sounded through the earth. It repeated, then rose to a bone-shaking thunder as two brilliant lights pinioned Gennady from the far end of the street.
He clicked off the flashlight but the thing was already coming at him
. The ground shook as it began to gallop.
There was no time to even see what it was. Gennady fled through whipping underbrush and under low branches, trying to evade the uncannily accurate lamps that sought him out. He heard steel shriek and the thud of falling trees as it flung aside all the obstacles he tried to put between them.
Ahead a narrow alley made a black rectangle between two warehouses. He ran into it. It was choked with debris and weeds. “Damn.” Light welled up behind him.
Both warehouses had doors and windows opening off the alley. One door was ajar. On a sudden inspiration he flicked on the flashlight and threw it hard through a window of the other building, then dove for the open door.
He heard the sound of concrete scraping as the thing shouldered its way between the buildings. The lights were intense, and the noise of its engines was awful. Then the lights went out, as it paused. He had the uncanny impression that it was looking for him.
Gennady stood in a totally empty concrete-floored building. Much of the roof had gone, and in the dim light he could see a clear path to the front door.
Cinderblocks shuddered and crashed outside. It was knocking a hole in the other building. Gennady ran for the door and made it through. The windows of the other warehouse were lit up.
He ran up the street to his building, and when he got inside he pulled his bike into a back room and raced up the stairs. He could hear the thing roaring around the neighbourhood for what seemed like hours, and then the noise slowly faded into the distance, and he fell back on his bedroll, exhausted.
At dawn he packed up and by mid morning he had left Pripyat and the contaminated zone behind him.
Merrick poured pepper vodka into a tall glass and handed it to Gennady. “Dosvedanya. We picked up Druschenko this morning.”
Gennady wondered as he sipped how the vodka would react with the iodine pill he’d just taken. Traffic noises and the smell of diesel wafted through the open window of Merrick’s Kiev office. Merrick tipped back his own drink, smiled brightly and went to sit behind the huge oak desk that dominated the room.
“I have to thank you, Gennady. We literally couldn’t find anyone else who was willing to go in there on the ground.” He shook his head. “People panic at the thought of radiation.”
“Don’t much like it myself.” Gennady took another sip. “But you can detect and avoid it. Not so simple to do with the stuff that comes out of the smokestacks these days. Or gets by the filters at the water plant.”
Merrick nodded. “So you were able to take all the right precautions.”
Gennady thought of Bogoliubov’s warm tea settling in his stomach . . . and he had done other stupid things there too. But the doctors insisted his overall dosage was “acceptable”. His odds for getting cancer had gone up as much as if he’d been chain-smoking for the past six months. Acceptable? How could one know?
“So that’s that,” said Merrick. “You found absolutely no evidence that anyone but Druschenko had visited the sarcophagus, right? Once we prove that it was him driving the RPV, we’ll be able to close this file entirely. I think you deserve a bonus, Gennady, and I’ve almost got the board to agree.”
“Well, thanks.” RPV – they had decided the dragon must be one of the Remotely Piloted Vehicles that the Trust had used to build the new sarcophagus. Druschenko had taken some of the stockpiled parts and power supplies from a Trust warehouse, and apparently gotten one of the old lifters going. It was the only way he could open the sarcophagus and survive.
Merrick was happy. Lisa was ecstatic that he was out of Pripyat. It all seemed too easy to Gennady; maybe it was because they hadn’t seen the thing. This morning he’d walked down to the ironworks to watch someone using a Chernobyl-model RPV near the kilns. It had looked like a truck with legs, and moved like a sloth. Nothing like the thing that had chased him across the city.
Anyway, he had his money. He chatted with Merrick for a while, then Gennady left to find a bank machine, and prove to himself he’d been paid. First order of business, a new suit. Then he was going to shop for one of those new interfaces for his system. Full virtual reality, like he’d been dreaming about for months.
The noise and turbulence of Kiev’s streets hit him like a wall. People everywhere, but no one noticed anyone else in a city like this. He supposed most people drifted through the streets treating all these strangers around as no more than ghosts, but he couldn’t do that. As he passed an old woman who was begging on the corner, he found himself noticing the laugh lines around her eyes that warred with the deeply scored lines of disappointment around her mouth; the meticulous stitchwork where she had repaired the sleeves of her cheap dress spoke of a dignity that must make her situation seem all the worse for her. He couldn’t ignore her, but he couldn’t help her either.
For a while he stood at a downtown intersection, staring over the sea of people. Above the grimy façades, a haze of coal smoke and exhaust banded the sky a yellow that matched the shade on the grimy tattered flags hanging from the street lamps.
Everywhere, he saw victims of The Release. Men and women with open sores or wearing the less visible scars of destitution and disappointment dawdled on the kerbs, stared listlessly through shop windows at goods they would never be able to afford on their meagre pensions. No one looked at them.
He bought the interface instead of the suit, and the next day he didn’t go out at all.
He was nursing a crick in his neck, drinking some weak tea and preparing to go back into a huge international consensual-reality game he now had the equipment to play, when Lisa called.
“Look, Lisa, I’ve got new toys.”
“Why am I not surprised. Have you been out at all since you got back?”
“No. I’m having fun.”
“How are you going to meet a nice Ukrainian girl if you never go out?”
“Maybe I like English girls better.”
“Oh yeah? Then fly to England. You just got paid.”
“The Net is so much faster. And I have the right attachments now.”
She laughed. “Toys. I see. You want the latest news on the case?”
He frowned. No, actually, he didn’t think he did. But she lived for this sort of thing. “Sure,” he said to indulge her.
“Druschenko says he was just the courier. Says he never drove the dragon at all. He’s actually quite frantic – he claims he was paid to bring supplies in and do the initial hook up of a RPV, but that’s all. Of course, he’s made some mighty big purchases lately, and we can’t trace the money and he won’t tell us where it is. So it’s a stalemate.”
Gennady thought about Merrick’s cheerful confidence the other day. “Did the Trust actually make the most recent payment to the extortionist?”
“No. They could hardly afford to, and anyway Druschenko –”
“Could not have acted alone.”
“What?”
“Come on, Lisa. You said yourself you can’t find the money. It went into the Net, right? That’s your territory, it’s not Druschenko’s. He’s a truck driver, not a hacker, for God’s sake. Listen, have they put a Geiger counter on him?”
“Why . . .”
“Find out how hot he is. He had to have been piloting the RPV from nearby, unless he had a satellite link, and there too, he’s just a truck driver, not James Bond. Find out how hot he is.”
“Um. Maybe you have a point.”
“And another thing. Has the Trust put some boats in the river to check for another radiation plume?”
“I don’t know.”
“We better find out. Because I’ll bet you a case of vodka there’s going to be another Release.”
“Can I call you right back?”
“Certainly.” He hung up, shaking his head. People who lived by Occam’s Razor died young. That, he supposed, was why he got paid the big bucks.
He spent most of the next week in the Net, venturing out for groceries and exercise. He smiled at a pretty clerk in the grocery store, and she smiled back
, but he never knew what to say in such situations, where he couldn’t hide behind an avatar’s mask or simply disappear if he embarrassed himself; so he didn’t talk to her.
In the platonic perfection of the Net, though, Gennady had dozens of friends and business connections. Between brief searches for new work, he participated in numerous events, both games and art pieces. Here he could be witty, and handsome. And there was no risk. But when he finally rolled into bed at night, there was no warm body there waiting for him, and at those times he felt deeply lonely.
In the morning the computer beckoned, and he would quickly forget the feeling.
Merrick interrupted him in the middle of a tank battle. In this game, Gennady was one of the British defending North Africa against the Desert Fox. The sensual qualities of his new interface were amazing; he could feel the heat, the grit of the sand, almost smell it. The whole effect was ruined when the priority one window opened in the middle of the air above his turret, and Merrick said, “Gennady, I’ve got a new job for you.”
North Africa dissolved. Gennady realized his back hurt and his mouth was dry. “What is it?” he snapped.
“I wouldn’t be calling if I didn’t think you were the perfect man for the job. We need someone to make a very brief visit to Pripyat. Shouldn’t take more than a day.”
“Where’s that bonus you promised me?”
“I was coming to that. The board’s authorized me to pay you an additional twenty per cent bonus for work already done. That’s even if you turn down this contract.”
“Ah. I see. So what is it you need?” He was interested, but he didn’t want to appear too eager. Could lower the price that way.
“We want to make sure the sarcophagus is intact. We were going to do a helicopter inspection, but it’s just possible Druschenko did some low level . . . well, to put it bluntly, got inside.”
“Inside? What do you mean, inside?”
“There may be some explosives inside the sarcophagus. Now we don’t want anybody going near it, physically. Have you ever piloted an RPV?”
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