Russian Spring

by Norman Spinrad

  “No! Yes! Arrr!” Brandusi rolled his eyes skyward in exasperated frustration, but as Jerry well knew, there was really nothing he could do, for the cat was already out of the bag, and any attempt to stuff it back in would only make the noisome creature that much more conspicuous. They couldn’t shut him up now, nor could they fire him.

  Of course, they could, and did, take bureaucratic vengeance.

  While Jerry became a hero to the lower scientific and engineering echelons of the Agency as the “Father of the Grand Tour Navette,” the powers that be kept him on as chief testing engineer long after most of his original équipe, including Emile Lourade, were promoted up and out.

  And his eventual promotion to chief engineer of the prototype fabrication section was mainly the result of internal pressure from people like Emile, who were now chafing rather loudly at the budgetary policy that was turning ESA into little more than an arm of the consortium building Spaceville, which these “Space Cadets,” as they had already begun to call themselves defiantly, saw as draining the lifeblood out of the Common Europe space program.

  Jerry found himself drawn deeper and deeper into the Space Cadet movement, speaking at unofficial seminars, appearing from time to time at science-fiction conventions, giving the occasional press interview, becoming the point man for the Grand Tour Navette Project, if not entirely against his will, then certainly against his hope of career advancement.

  For the more the Space Cadets agitated for a commitment to the project against the will of the bureaucracy, the more that bureaucracy took out its displeasure on the most obviously available target, the adopted godfather of the Space Cadets and father of the Grand Tour Navette, the American in their midst, Jerry Reed.

  Finally, when Space Cadets like Emile Lourade, Gunter Schmitz, Franco Nuri, and Patrice Corneau began percolating into upper middle management, the movement had enough clout within the Agency, if not to ram through a Grand Tour Navette design study, then at least to get their mentor into the design end again at last.

  But the higher-ups put a nasty little spin on it, making him chief engineer on the LEO to GEO freighter project, where, with an irony that was lost on no one, he was constrained to spend his time and energies essentially scaling down the visionary Grand Tour Navette concept into mere automated freighters to ferry construction material from Low Earth Orbit to Spaceville.

  Perhaps they thought this would get him to resign from the Agency in terminal disgust, perhaps this was merely their symbolic means of slapping down the Space Cadets and their pet project, but either way, Jerry had no place to go, so once more, he accepted the inevitable, hung in, hunkered down, and waited.

  And now, it appeared, his endless patience was finally about to be rewarded.

  The negotiations between the Russians and Strasbourg had ripened to the point where the entry of the Soviet Union into Common Europe had become inevitable, and all that was left was the thrashing out of the details.

  One of which was the extent to which the Soviet and Common European space programs would be merged and who would contribute how much to what kind of budget. And the Russians were being sticky about it.

  ESA had plenty to gain from the Russians. The Soviets had four large Cosmograds in Low Earth Orbit. They had a new generation of Heavy Lift Vehicles with twice the payload of the old Energias. They had a permanent scientific base on the Moon. They fielded repeat expeditions to Mars and were talking about a permanent base.

  What Common Europe could offer in return was not very much. The Soviets were already co-producers of the Concordski. The orbital tankers were modified Russian hardware, Spaceville was being cobbled together from the same, leaving the Soviets understandably reluctant to participate in a project from which they had nothing to gain in the way of new technology. About the only thing Common Europe had to offer was a merged space budget under which the Soviet end of the program would be the net financial gainer, and that went over like a ripe fart with the Common European Parliament.

  Then Emile Lourade made his mysterious trip to Strasbourg.

  Emile, by this time, had risen to director of the advanced planning section, the highest any of the Space Cadets had gone, but something of a hollow position, since there were no advanced projects on the drawing boards and still no hope for any in the budget for years to come.

  No one knew what had really happened. Emile had apparently made the trip on his own. He had stayed in Strasbourg for a week. He had testified behind closed doors to Parliamentary committees. He had had meetings with Ministers.

  When he came back to Paris, everyone had expected the Agency Director, Armand Labrenne, to fire him for insubordination. Instead, to the amazement of everyone, a week later Labrenne announced his sudden retirement for “health reasons,” and Emile Lourade was named Director of the European Space Agency.

  And now his old protégé and friend Emile had summoned Jerry Reed to a meeting only two days after his appointment.

  It was raining as Jerry arrived at ESA headquarters, but the weather couldn’t dampen his spirits, for while he could not quite conceive of what Emile Lourade had said to the politicians to make himself Director, he was quite sure he knew what this meeting was about.

  That one of Emile’s first acts as Director was to summon the father of the Grand Tour Navette to his office could mean only one thing. Indeed, that a Space Cadet like Emile Lourade had replaced Labrenne so suddenly after whatever had happened in Strasbourg was a loud, clear declaration that his Space Cadets had been put in charge of the Agency to change its direction.

  At long, long last, the Grand Tour Navette was going to become an official European Space Agency project.

  And of course, Emile was going to make him chief project engineer, or perhaps even project director.

  That his dream was about to come true was only just, but that his old friend Emile should be the man to give him the good news, ah, that was the chocolate syrup on his bowl of Häagen-Dazs.

  “Dimitri Pavelovich Smerlak had harsh words today for those who would allow petty national chauvinisms to intrude themselves into the treaty negotiations.

  “ ‘The national allocations of Soviet seats in the Common European Parliament cannot and will not be a subject of discussion between the Soviet government and Common Europe,’ the President declared. ‘The spectacle of Ukrainians and Kazhaks picketing their own embassy in Geneva is shameful. They are only resorting to such obstructive tactics because they have no hope of gerrymandering national quotas in the democratically elected Supreme Soviet. And we will never consider allowing internal Soviet election laws to be subject to review by the Common European Parliament.’ ”

  —Vremya

  Heads nodded and faces smiled as Sonya Gagarin Reed came bustling through the data pit on the way to her office, late again after breaking up yet another breakfast shouting match between Franja and Robert.

  “Good morning, Sonya.”

  “Good morning, Comrade Gagarin.”

  The computer slaves called her “Sonya” if they had been there long enough and “Comrade Gagarin” if they were still wet behind the ears, for Sonya had long since taken to calling herself “Sonya Ivanovna Gagarin” at work, as if that were going to solve her problems with the elusive Moscow Mandarins.

  Once, you could have pointed an unambiguous finger at Party commissars or the KGB, and once, they would have made their wishes bluntly obvious and the penalties painfully clear. But this was the Russian Spring, and it simply would not do to remind anyone of the governmental nature of Red Star, S.A., or for the KGB to be caught transmitting diktats to its employees in the West.

  Thus the Moscow Mandarinate, the nebulous level between official government circles and the upper management of Red Star. Officially, of course, it did not exist. Officially Red Star was an independent corporation chartered under Common European law whose majority stockholder just happened to be the government of the Soviet Union. Officially its decisions were made by its own board of directors.


  But in the real world, Red Star was an organ of the Soviet State, connected to the policy level by the interconnected and interpenetrating bureaucracies of the Party and the government. You could never quite focus on who or what back in Moscow pulled which strings, but the Moscow Mandarins had no trouble at all passing their displeasure down the line to you.

  Sonya disappeared into what she still thought of as her new office, closed the door behind her, and sank into the swivel chair behind her desk. There was an electric espresso machine on the desk as well as a smart videotel, and an untidy mess of correspondence and printouts, and she thumbed the coffee maker on and waited impatiently for the ninety seconds it took to cough up the day’s first cup.

  Red Star might have built its very own building here on the newly trendy Avenue Kennedy in the always-chic Trocadéro end of the 16th, but the assistant head of the economic strategy department didn’t rate a major office with a real view. Still, this little office did have a window peeking around the edge of the neighboring Sony building on her own tiny slice of the Seine, and at least it was finally hers.

  It had certainly taken her long enough to get here! If she was not quite in disfavor, she knew full well that she had long been skating on thin bureaucratic ice, for she had only finally acceded to this position by plodding bureaucratic seniority, which was not the way things usually worked in the Red Star meritocracy at all.

  By rights, she should have been department head long ago; she had been in the economic strategy department longer than anyone, she knew France far better than any of the timeservers they had brought in from Russia above her, and it was only Jerry who had kept her from advancing as she should have.

  That had once more been made painfully clear when they had brought Ilya Pashikov in from Moscow to be department head above her two months ago instead of giving her the job when Gorski left for the London post.

  Indeed Pashikov himself had seemed rather embarrassed at their first meeting in the big corner office. He had admitted with rather engaging forthrightness that she should have been seated behind the big old walnut desk instead of himself. “But under the circumstances . . . ,” he had said, without quite meeting her gaze. And she had not been crude enough to force him to amplify.

  For she knew only too well that she was in political purdah. Oh yes, they had given her her Party card or she would never have even gotten this far, but her kharakteristika had plenty of good-sized gray marks, if not quite any great big black one.

  She had never worked in the Soviet Union. She had secured this coveted Parisian posting in a politically shady manner, which, while it spoke favorably for her negotiating abilities, made her political loyalties slightly suspect.

  More to the point, she was married to an American, who, while he might be considered a traitor by Washington, was still perversely American enough to refuse the benefits of Soviet citizenship to her own children.

  She had ranted and raved at Jerry for weeks after Pashikov had come in over her, but he would have none of it. His eyes would glaze over, and he would mutter “politique politicienne,” and he would disappear back into outer space.

  The coffee came whooshing and foaming into the cup, and Sonya gulped half of it down. Why couldn’t he understand? It could be so easy. It wasn’t as if she was asking him to renounce his own American citizenship. All he had to do was let Robert and Franja become citizens of the Soviet Union, as was their right under Soviet law.

  But no—

  The intercom buzzed. “Ilya here, Sonya, where have you been, I’ve been—”

  “I’m sorry, Comrade Pashikov, the children—”

  “Yes, yes, well, will you please come to my office right now—”

  “If you’ll just give me a few minutes to get together the daily—”

  “Never mind the daily update for now, we can go over that after lunch,” Pashikov said, “this is about another matter.”

  Sonya somehow didn’t like the sound of that, and when she reached the Director’s office, she didn’t like the look on Ilya Pashikov’s face either.

  She and Pashikov had developed a peculiar relationship, somewhat strained on the one hand, yet on the other less strained than it could have been under the circumstances.

  Pashikov was a few years younger than Sonya, with elegantly coifed long blond hair very much à la mode, clear blue eyes, and dramatically chiseled, almost Tartar features, and he wore his expensively tailored clothes like a model and moved like a dancer. He was one attractive male animal, Sonya could not help but find him attractive, and oh yes, he knew it.

  It would have been insufferable if he had acknowledged this, but Ilya Pashikov was very much the suave Eurorussian man of the world; indeed, since this was his first assignment outside the Soviet Union, he worked hard at it.

  Pashikov was clearly one of the Moscow Mandarinate’s favorite sons; what for Sonya was the long-denied apex to an ordinary bureaucratic career was for him only a way station on a fast-track rise to the top of the Red Star hierarchy, and perhaps beyond. Ilya Pashikov was undeniably connected.

  If Sonya was overqualified to be his assistant, Pashikov was a bit underqualified to be director of the economic strategy department, and one of his charms was that it seemed to embarrass him, at least in her presence. He relied upon her to put together the reports and strategy papers which he delivered to the Paris director as his own and let his embarrassment at that show too from time to time.

  Pashikov looked embarrassed right now, but there was something squirmy and furtive about it, which had never at all been Ilya’s style.

  “Problems with Robert and Franja again?” he said as he poured her a glass of tea from the samovar.

  Sonya shrugged. “The usual big sister, younger brother business,” she said, “you know teenagers!”

  Pashikov shrugged. “I’m afraid I do not,” he said, “single as I unfortunately am. . . .”

  “Yes, I know,” Sonya said dryly, “and you find it a great hardship.”

  Ilya laughed. “I manage to survive, with a little help from my lady friends,” he admitted.

  “Surely we are not here to discuss my children or your love life, Ilya Sergeiovich. . . .”

  Pashikov frowned. “As you know, I am not one to meddle in your domestic affairs,” he said, “but . . .”

  “But?”

  Pashikov drummed his fingers nervously on the desktop. “This is not my idea, you understand, I find this rather embarrassing. . . .” he muttered, avoiding her eyes.

  “There is an old Russian proverb which I have just made up,” Sonya told him. “ ‘When you find yourself with a turd in your mouth, it is best to either swallow it immediately or spit it out at once, considering the flavor.’ ”

  Pashikov laughed. “It’s about the new Director of the European Space Agency. . . .” he blurted.

  Sonya cocked her head at him expectantly.

  “Emile Lourade . . . ? He is an old friend of your husband, is he not?”

  Jerry is meeting with him right now, Sonya’s instincts kept her from saying. “In a manner of speaking . . . ,” she said instead.

  “Something very peculiar is going on at the European Space Agency, surely being married to Jerry Reed, you know that much . . . ,” Pashikov said slowly.

  “You mean about the way Emile Lourade suddenly became Director?”

  Pashikov nodded. “He goes to Strasbourg, it would seem not at all under orders from Armand Labrenne. He talks privately with delegates and Ministers. He testifies to Parliamentary committees at closed meetings, which the KGB is unable to penetrate. When he comes back to Paris, Labrenne resigns for so-called health reasons, even though his medical records, which the KGB was able to access, show nothing of the kind, and Lourade becomes Director. . . .”

  “So?” Sonya said.

  “So you tell me. . . .”

  “Tell you what?”

  “What happened?”

  “I don’t understand. . . .”

  “Neither do
we,” Pashikov told her. “That’s the whole point.”

  “I don’t mean to seem dimwitted, Ilya Sergeiovich, but I do not get the point,” Sonya said. “What does any of this have to do with Red Star?”

  Pashikov drummed his fingers on the desktop again. “Red Star may not be officially involved in the negotiations for the Soviet Union’s entry into Common Europe, but as you know, from time to time we are . . . asked to assist with information by various agencies. . . .”

  “Like the KGB?”

  “Not this time,” Pashikov said quickly. “This request comes from the Space Ministry, they are the ones handling the negotiations that will determine the nature and contractual terms for the merger of the Soviet and Common Europe space programs when we enter Common Europe. The negotiations have reached a rather sticky point over budgetary shares, and now . . . this!”

  “Now what?”

  “That’s exactly what our negotiators would like to know as quickly as possible!” Pashikov exclaimed.

  “Surely that sort of thing is a matter for the KGB, not our economic strategy department. . . .”

  Pashikov shrugged, and the furtiveness which had evaporated during all this came rushing back. “Ordinarily that would be true,” he said. “But under the circumstances . . .”

  “Under what—” Sonya caught herself short.

  “Oh,” she said much more quietly.

  Ilya Sergeiovich heaved a great sigh of relief. He shrugged again. “To put it delicately,” he said, steepling his fingers, “the Space Ministry has officially requested a report from this department on the matter of Emile Lourade’s sudden ascension, with particular emphasis on any policy changes involved that may affect the negotiations. . . . It has been suggested that . . . you prepare this report personally . . . considering the . . . unique resources at your command. . . .”

  He paused, looked down at the desktop, then looked her straight in the eye for the first time during this whole séance. “We do understand each other fully, do we not, Sonya Gagarin . . . Reed?” he said softly.