The Mammoth Book of Best New SF 15

by Gardner Dozois

  Glaring at Aksyonov, Shandarin flipped a switch at the base of the prime minister’s antiquated desk microphone and adjusted his own compact headset, which had been deemed too complicated for the visitor. “Speakers, please,” Shandarin said.

  Amplified static filled the room. Aksyonov sat at his reassuringly cluttered station and focused on the blinking dot that marked Novikov’s position on a world map – as if the cosmonaut’s border crossings, one every few minutes, mattered to him now.

  “Union One, this is Baikonur. Union One, this is Baikonur, can you hear me, Union One?” More static. “Union One, this is Baikonur. Please respond if you can hear me, Union One.”

  More static, then: “I’m doing it, I’m doing it, but it doesn’t work. Do you hear me, Baikonur? It doesn’t work!” More static.

  Shandarin raised his eyebrows at the flight director, who said, “We asked him to try the automatic stabilizers again.”

  Aksyonov shook his head. How many different ways could a man push the same button?

  “Union One, this is Baikonur. We hear you, and we continue to work on the problem. But now we have another visitor for you, Union One, a very important visitor who wants to speak with you. Here beside me is the prime minister of the Soviet Union. Do you understand, Union One?”

  More static. Then: “The prime minister?”

  “Yes, Union One. I ask for your attention. The next voice you hear will be that of the prime minister, with a personal message of tribute.” He nodded at the prime minister, who nodded in return, leaned close enough to the microphone to kiss it, and shouted:

  “Greetings, Jakov Novikov, loyal son of our Motherland, wonderful Communist, courageous explorer of space, comrade in arms, and friend . . . ”

  Responding to Shandarin’s signals, Aksyonov and the team leaders joined him and the general in the back of the room.

  “Obviously Novikov will be unable to maneuver the craft into the best trajectory for re-entry,” Shandarin said. “The best he can do is turn the craft so that the heat shield faces the Earth, and then fire the retro-rockets. Discussion?”

  Everyone spoke at once, and after one loud instant muted themselves so as not to disturb the prime minister.

  “That’s suicide – ”

  “It’s such a narrow window, he’ll never – ”

  “He’ll be so far off course, God knows where he’ll end up – ”

  “He’ll have no way to control the spin as he comes down – ”

  “You all have considered this outcome already, I see,” Shandarin said. “Have you also thought of other options? Perhaps Novikov should press every button in the craft another hundred times, until the radio dies, and we all go home?”

  No one replied. A couple of the men shook their heads. All looked pale and sick.

  “Aksyonov, you are uncharacteristically silent. What do you say?”

  “I just broke a young man’s neck, Madam, with a slide rule and the stroke of a pen.”

  “What?”

  Aksyonov pressed the heels of his hands to his forehead. “I am talking to myself, Comrade. I apologize. But much as I hate to admit it, I must agree with you. I see no other option.”

  “We’re trusting to blind luck!” one man said.

  “Perhaps so,” Shandarin retorted, “but all the luck in orbit has run out. If any luck remains for this flight, Novikov must find it on re-entry.”

  The flight director lighted a cigarette and ticked off items on his fingers. “Solar panel down. Shortwave radio down. Stabilizers down. Thrusters down. Suppose the retro-rockets are down, too? And the parachute, for that matter?”

  “And the ejection seat?” the general added.

  The others looked at the floor. “Comrade General,” Aksyonov said, as gently as he could, “on Union One there is no ejection seat. You approved the design yourself, Comrade General.”

  The general began to curse, and the others returned to their stations. Shandarin gripped Aksyonov’s upper arm so tightly that the younger man winced.

  “I will not forget your support,” Shandarin said.

  Aksyonov wrenched himself free.

  The prime minister glanced up from his text, then faltered before he found his place again. “In all future generations, your name will summon the glory of our great Socialist country to new feats – ”

  Then Novikov’s voice, the voice of a man roused from a long trance, ripped from the speakers:

  “What is this bullshit? God damn! God damn! Baikonur! Baikonur! This is Union One. Help me, Baikonur!”

  The prime minister sat frozen, mouth agape. Shoving past Aksyonov, Shandarin switched on his headset. “This is Baikonur, Union One. Explain yourself, Union One!”

  “Explain myself? Explain myself! Shit shit shit!” More static. “Don’t you understand? You’ve got to do something. I don’t want to die. Do you hear me, Baikonur? I don’t want to die!”

  A fresh burst of static obliterated his next words, but Aksyonov, like everyone else in the room, recognized their rhythms; he himself had sobbed just as uncontrollably at the Chief’s funeral.

  The cosmonaut’s despair seemed to yank something vital from Shandarin. He swayed forward like a falling tree, slammed his hands onto the desktop, and leaned there, looking at nothing.

  With a trembling hand, the general switched off the prime minister’s microphone. “Perhaps under the circumstances,” he began.

  “Yes, of course,” the prime minister said, as he swept up his papers and his briefcase. He stood so clumsily that the swivel chair toppled over. The guards, staring at the loudspeakers, paid the prime minister no heed as the general hustled him out the door.

  Shandarin slumped against the console. Still Novikov continued to sob. Three dozen faces looked up at Shandarin. Several were streaked with tears.

  Aksyonov couldn’t stand it. “Say something!” he hissed. “Reassure him. Tell him we have a plan.”

  He shook Shandarin once, twice. Then he slapped him, a blistering crack that affected Shandarin not at all.

  “I . . . I can’t . . . I don’t . . . ” Shandarin’s voice was a ghastly, slurred imitation of itself.

  The flight director cried, “For God’s sake, talk to him!”

  Aksyonov strode to the prime minister’s microphone, switched it on, and said:

  “Novikov. Novikov. Think of the Chief.”

  Amid the static, a small voice. “ . . . What . . . ?”

  Absolute silence in the control room.

  “The Chief, Novikov. What would the Chief do?”

  “ . . . The Chief . . .”

  “This is Aksyonov. You remember me, eh? Your upside-down engineer friend? You piloted me into orbit, Novikov, and brought me safely down again, and I complained the whole way – you did it, Novikov. We did it. You and me and the doctor, and the Chief. Do you remember?”

  “Yes . . . yes, Comrade . . . I remember.”

  “Listen to me, Novikov. We have a plan, a plan I believe the Chief would approve of. But first, I want to read you something. You remember the note I carried into space? The note the Chief gave me just before launch? You told me then that I shouldn’t read you the note until the proper time had come. Well, I have the note with me now, Novikov. I have carried it in my pocket ever since. Let me unfold it now . . . Here is what it says, Novikov. It says, ‘My friend, I am good at spacecraft design because I know just what cosmonauts feel like. I too have been alone and frightened and very far from home, and surrounded by the cold. Soon you will know how this feels, as well. But I survived, my friend, and so will you, and we will continue to design great things together. Signed, the Chief.’ Do you understand, Novikov? The Chief knows exactly how you feel.”

  A long silence. Aksyonov watched the blinking dot approach Africa. One of the team leaders thrust a printout under his nose and whispered, “The nineteenth orbit is coming up. It’s his last chance to – ” Aksyonov waved him away.

  The cosmonaut spoke. “The Chief . . . is dead.”


  “Do you really believe that, Novikov? Do you really for a moment believe that?”

  More static, then Novikov slowly and soberly replied: “No, Comrade. No, I don’t.”

  Aksyonov dragged the microphone with him as he sat on the floor. He no longer could see the map, just the Chief’s face, laughing in the darkness outside Gagarin’s cottage. “I don’t either, Novikov,” Aksyonov said, and raked the tears from his eyes. He smiled at the men to left and right who passed him calculations and tissues. “Now listen to me carefully. Here’s what we are going to do . . . ”

  The Union One plunged through the atmosphere, tumbled end over end like a boy who has lost his sled halfway down the hill, its useless parachute a braided rope behind.

  The final intelligible radio transmission from its pilot was not the despairing

  you are guiding me wrongly, you are guiding me wrongly, can’t you understand

  reported by a U.S. intelligence officer years after the fact, but in fact a later message, a three-word scrap:

  Chief is here

  Some who have heard the tape do not believe, and say these are not the words.

  But the cosmonauts – they believe.

  XII. BAIKONUR COSMODROME, 22 AUGUST 1997

  “Excellent!”

  “Wonderful!”

  “Good job, Peace!”

  Cheers, applause, shouts reverberated through the control room. People hugged, kissed, pounded one another on the back.

  One of the small, short-haired women – Lyudmilla? No, Lyudmilla had vacationed in Prague, and now sported a half-dozen earrings in her right ear, all the way up, like the spiral in a notebook – one of them, anyway, was swept into the air by that oaf Atkov, who did not even know how to use a slide rule. They kissed with a smack audible over the din, and then Atkov handed her to the next man, Serebrov? Shatalov? One of the newcomers. She kissed him, too, and squealed like a child.

  Aksyonov watched, and said nothing. The engineers were due some good news, some release, and he supposed he could suffer their enthusiasm. For a while.

  Aksyonov stood alone on the topmost row at the back of the room, hands clasped behind. He stood rigid, head tilted. At his left elbow was the big standing model of the Peace, its core module likewise tilted, a few degrees off true.

  The official mission control room for the Peace was outside Moscow, of course, in the complex named for the Chief. But the entire Russian space program had been on red alert since the June 25 collision – especially Baikonur, where Earth’s lone space station had been designed and built.

  Onscreen, the three crewmen – Solovyev, Vinogradov, and Mike the American – crouched over their instruments. The image was blurred, but they obviously were grinning like NASA chimps. Mike the American held up both his thumbs as he grimaced, as if being tortured. This was for television’s benefit. Yet the crew had reason to be happy, of course. Askyonov looked at his watch. For another few seconds.

  “Confirmed, Moscow,” Solovyev said, his voice fractured by static. “All electrical circuits working fine. The new hatch is a success. Repeat, a success. Full power is restored.”

  A new round of cheers and shrieks in the control room. Aksyonov’s lips moved as he counted. Eight. Five. Three. Tolubko strode up the stairs toward him, smiling behind her headset microphone, her heavy eyebrows a single dark swath across her pretty face. He nodded at her, then clapped his hands once, twice, solid reports. He would have clapped a third time, but the room was already silent.

  “Gentlemen and ladies,” he called out. “To your tasks, please.” He disdained the public-address system. His reedy quaver was embarrassing enough these days without amplification. Yet he was heard. Look how they bustled into position. The workaday murmur resumed. The party was over.

  Sometimes they forgot that Askyonov’s role here was purely sentimental, purely ceremonial. Sometimes Aksyonov forgot it himself. Why did his colleagues always jump when he so much as lifted an eyebrow? He would never understand it, no, not if he lived to be two hundred, and had helped build twenty-five space stations, flying all the flags of the world.

  “Moscow wants you to say a word,” Tolubko said.

  Surprised, Aksyonov picked up and put on his headset, which he had wrenched off in a brief moment of jubilation. He cast an inquiring glance at Tolubko. She nodded and mouthed, “You’re on.”

  “Comrades on Peace, this is Aksyonov,” he said. He saw Tolubko frown at “comrades,” but he couldn’t devote the short remainder of his life to preventing Tolubko’s frowns, could he? “You have done well. You have made history, comrades, with your indoor space walk.” Why did they look so blurred? It was his eyes, Tolubko had assured him. Yet another body part failing. “But now we down here must make some history of our own, if this station is to become fully functional again. Stand by, please. Aksyonov out.”

  Why bother? He lacked the Chief’s eloquence; he always had. Suddenly weary, he peeled off the headset. Tolubko nodded at her second, Merkys, who nodded in turn and began rattling off suggestions to Moscow, reading from a clipboard that others kept sliding papers onto. Aksyonov set down the headset, too close, it happened, to the edge of the desk. His hand shot out to catch it, but missed. The little plastic hoop tumbled to the floor. A dart in his shoulder, he had strained himself again. Tolubko crouched to retrieve the headset, her skirt riding up, and stood beside him again, reminding him anew that she was taller than he was. She touched his arm.

  “Evgeny?” she murmured. “Are you all right?”

  “I am fine,” he said. He knew he didn’t sound convincing. He leaned on the back of a chair. “I am a man of iron, my dear.” He nodded toward the model. “It is the Peace that is falling apart. Worry about her.”

  “The Peace has power again. Your turn now. Go to bed, Evgeny. Get some rest. Come back fresh tomorrow, when we’re ass-deep in crises again.” Her smile was an older woman’s smile, knowing and known. “We won’t repair everything while you’re gone. I promise.”

  As she spoke, she nudged him toward the exit, her arm around his shoulders, and Aksyonov let her. He did not appreciate being lectured, however gently, but he granted Tolubko many liberties. He knew she realized this, took advantage. What of it? The young had the advantage already.

  “I think the Georgians are coming by tomorrow,” Tolubko continued, as they neared the door. “You should look nice for them. Put on your other shirt.”

  “The hell with the Georgians,” Aksyonov said. He halted, and Tolubko walked just a little past before compensating. “Don’t tell me about the Georgians. If the Georgians hadn’t charged us the moon for that automated guidance system, Moscow wouldn’t have made us steer the cargo ship in by hand in the first place. No wonder we knocked the station half out of orbit.” He waved at the men on the screen. “It ought to be Georgians up there, treading water. Putting out fires.” He faltered, snorted. “Georgians!”

  Tolubko was smiling. He flushed.

  “You have heard all this before,” he muttered. “Why don’t you interrupt?”

  She squeezed his arm. “You told me once, ‘No one learns anything by interrupting.” ’

  “I tell you many things,” he said. “You don’t have to listen.”

  The guard held the door open, waiting. He looked terrified – whether of the old man, or of the young woman, Aksyonov couldn’t tell. Maybe he feared being blamed for everything that had happened to the Peace this summer, from the collision onward. The guard in the back of the room, yes! He did it! That was no unreasonable fear in the Soviet Union, or in Yeltsin’s Russia, either.

  “Tolubko,” Merkys called. “Come look at these figures, will you?”

  “Be right there,” she called. “Good night, Evgeny.” He hesitated, and she pushed, so slightly it was almost a telepathic pulse. “Good night.” She squeezed his arm again before striding away. He did not allow himself to watch the back of her head, the sway of her skirt. Ah, Evgeny, he thought. Once you laughed at such follies. Now you, too, a
re a foolish old man.

  As he passed, the guard asked, “May I radio for an escort, sir?”

  “No,” he replied, more harshly than he meant.

  “As you wish, sir. Good night, sir.”

  He wanted to say something friendly, to make the guard feel better, but could think of nothing. Was this the guard with the young son, the boy with the scar? Fathers love to be asked about their children. Or was that one of the other guards? Oh, the hell with it. The door had closed anyway, and Aksyonov was alone in the corridor.

  As he walked the winding incline he had walked for so many years, Aksyonov passed through three sets of guards and five sets of scanners and ignored them all. The guards saluted, and the scanners beeped, so he must have measured up to the Platonic Aksyonov of their memories. Or close enough.

  Between checkpoints, his footsteps echoed in the dim, deserted halls. The darkness was a budget-cutting measure. Lights were more critical in orbit, and so four-fifths of the overheads in the old sector, mostly used for storage, had been switched off. Aksyonov’s colleagues didn’t mind. Hadn’t Gorbachev, as a farewell gesture, built them a grand new entrance, with a new elevator bank? No longer any need to pass through this back way, this tilted maze, to reach the surface. Why not leave it to the rats?

  But Aksyonov was never in a hurry to reach the surface. He didn’t like elevators, either, not since Sunrise One. And he was secretly pleased to walk through space that others shunned. For people claimed strange experiences down here, in the old sector. To have seen people who, in the next instant, weren’t there. To have heard voices. The guards had petitioned for fewer checkpoints, consolidated shifts. (And, needless to add these days, more money.) Everyone was uneasy – except the scanners, which never saw anything odd, and Aksyonov, who had roamed these corridors for decades, and who wasn’t about to stop now. He hated agreeing with the scanners on anything.

  He was walking a little faster these days, though. For the exercise.

  He passed the last checkpoint and emerged into a full-face breeze on the north side of the windswept plaza, in front of Brezhnev’s hideous cafeteria. Aksyonov stood in the round mouth of the tunnel, breathed deeply, and stretched his arms, his habit whenever reaching the surface. A foolish habit; there was just as much room for stretching underground. He swung his arms back and forth, hugged himself three times, clap clap clap. Too cloudy for stargazing, but the night was warm, and the breeze was pleasant with the distant scents of wild onions and new-mown hay – a reminder, Aksyonov realized with a scowl, that there had been no launches in, how long? In the old days there was a fine, constant stench. He ripped a tuft of grass from a crack in the pavement, let the blades sift through his fingers. The weeds beneath the plaza survived every attempt at eradication. One night Aksyonov would camp out here, and watch them grow.