The Fourth Rome

by David Drake

  The tour group was mostly Westerners. The default language of the tour guide was English. They hadn’t been with the group for more than five minutes when a sharp-nosed Russian spotted them. This Russian, emaciated, waxy-skinned, and wearing eyeglasses held together with paper clips, sidled up to Grainger.

  The Russian asked, sotto voce, “American?” His breath and body smelled of strange spices and raw garlic.

  Grainger saw the frown on Roebeck’s face before he answered, “Yes.” Central had costumed them purposely to clearly mark them as Americans, for whatever protection easy identification with the world’s single remaining superpower might afford. The ARC Riders wore white running shoes, blue jeans over regulation bodysuit, puffy quilted parkas complete with US flag patches on the arms.

  “Ladies should wear coverings on their heads in this place.” The Russian’s hair was greasy, unwashed for far too long. Even soap was scarce here now, let alone shampoo.

  Damn, of course. This was a church, after all. And newly won religious freedom was quickly leading to religious fervor. Central hadn’t bothered to tell them they needed babushkas—head scarves—for the ladies.

  Roebeck and Chun had heard. The team exchanged glances for an instant in silent evaluation of possible damage control measures.

  Grainger said, “Custom dictates scarves, ladies,” very quietly, and tugged at the comm membrane around his throat.

  Chun rolled her almond eyes ceilingward as she and Roe-beck pulled their comm membranes up over their faces and foreheads to cover their hair and ears—barely. To Grainger, the ARC Riders with comm membranes on their heads looked like high-tech washerwomen. The membranes were a mottled gray color when not in use. The material was like nothing from this century. But maybe they’d pass. Many things from the outside world were still alien to the cloistered populace of the former USSR. The Soviet empire’s main preoccupation had been protecting its citizens from decadent, corrosive foreign influences.

  The frail Russian sidled even closer to Grainger—disturbingly close. Grainger wanted to back up but remembered that this culture had a different set of criteria for personal space. So he held his ground. The indig looked at his feet, saying in a whisper: “Interested in icons? I have copper icon, 15th century, very waluable.”

  “Nan, Chun, let’s move on.” Grainger tried to ignore the solicitation. This Russian could be what he seemed: a black-market entrepreneur who’d sighted a rich American. Selling cultural items to outsiders was a serious infraction of current local law. This hungry-looking fellow might be so desperate he was willing to take nearly any risk to get hard currency. If Grainger had been stupid enough to buy such a thing, chances were probably fifty-fifty that this waxy-faced Russian had friends working in airport Customs. The friends would have seized the icon as a hapless American tried to leave the country with his prize. The Russians would have shared the money. Then they would have looked for another fool to fleece. That is, unless the Russian was part of the security apparatus, in which case the game was a bit more sordid: catch an American doing something wrong and shake him down or use him for diplomatic leverage.

  Grainger moved away from the Russian, shaking his head. “Nyet, nyet. Spacebo.“ No, no. Thank you.

  Central had missed the bit about covered heads in churches, so what else might it have missed? Now that Grainger was attuned to the cultural faux pas, he remembered the occasional disapproving look from other tour groups filing through the small stone chapel rooms. “Let’s go, ladies. I’m getting real claustrophobic in here.”

  The truth always had a nice ring to it. And he couldn’t very well say, Got to get out of here before we do something else stupid.

  He left the would-be icon seller looking wistful, crestfallen, and disappointed. The “Evil Empire” of late 20th-century fame was staggering to a halt, but its traditions remained. Blat, or the black market trading of expropriated goods, was one of those traditions.

  The ARC Riders wandered through several twisting corridors lit only by arrow slits, looking for a way out. They jostled past tourists who stopped unpredictably, craning their necks to stare at the ruined splendor marginally preserved. In the main chambers, scaffolding abandoned against high walls still supported a few working lights. The lights threw an intermittent, anachronistic glare that cut like knives through age-old shadows.

  Down winding stone stairs and out the narrow arched door they went. Grainger had to stoop to pass. The team emerged from a covered portico, down three flights of broad steps into an early dusk laced with winter chill even in March.

  Out in the air, Grainger started feeling much better almost immediately. Even polluted air beat the close confines of Ivan the Terrible’s chapel. The cold reminded him how far north Moscow was. Zipping up his jacket, he felt the acoustic pistol in his hand-warmer pocket. A guard with a green uniform and red-piped cap eyed them curiously.

  “Let’s go now!” he muttered urgently, still working his cover. “I need a bathroom.” Plausible.

  Chun, Roebeck, and Grainger struck out for the Kremlin gates, past the huge bell commissioned by Catherine the Great and a cannon made for giants. They passed more guards. These soldiers were young men with cold-reddened cheeks. In tall fur hats they waited to twirl their rifles on their palms and march their stiff-legged march when the honor guard changed. The honor guard stared straight ahead, stubbornly unwilling to admit that anything that could change their traditional role in society had occurred. Ancient cobbles underfoot had been worn by peasants, sleighs, wheeled carriages, revolutionary mobs, automotive tires, obedient workers, missile trucks, disobedient workers, and tank treads in turn.

  The colored onion domes of St. Basil’s gleamed dully in sunset. Across Red Square, the state department store, Gum, sprawled Gothic and looming. Black government cars came by in a flag-fendered rush: Zils with chromed grills like sharks’ teeth, Ladas full of spooks from Dzerzhinski Square. Before them, the gates to the working Kremlin opened and then closed. The red brick walls had swallowed them up.

  Seeing unescorted Westerners, peddlers scuttled out from shadows toward the ARC Riders. Wan children and sparse-toothed old men, backed up by toughs in uniquely Russian gray leather jackets, approached like jackals from the bush. One blond boy came right up to Roebeck before Grainger could intervene.

  “Hard Rock Cafe Moscow!” he proclaimed. His hands, blue with cold, held out a T-shirt with bilingual printing.

  “Don’t buy anything. They’ll be all over us,” Chun hissed. Behind her, already more than a dozen Russians with bags full of goods were watching whether Roebeck would buy.

  “Where’s Hard Rock Cafe Moscow?” Roebeck asked the boy, slowly, clearly. “We’re hungry and we need a bathroom.” Her breath streamed white out of her mouth.

  The boy said, “We have only T-shirt, madam! Soon, if it is possible, we will have cafe. Now, buy T-shirt, okay? Twenty dollars, my first price to you.”

  “No, no,” Roebeck said as peddlers began to encircle them. “That’s too much.”

  “My first price, only first price to you.” The boy moved closer, pushing the T-shirt at her.

  Roebeck backed away. Grainger had a shoulder bag full of weapons that were totally useless in such a circumstance. He moved in, inserting himself between Roebeck, who was now walking swiftly backward, and the boy moving inexorably forward. All around, the encircling wall of peddlers grew thicker as it moved with them.

  “You haven’t heard my second price,” said the boy plaintively.

  “Forget it,” Grainger growled at the boy as kindly but firmly as he could manage. “We’re not buying anything, hear that? Nyet, nyet.“ He stared around at the thickening ring of peddlers. Over their heads he could see green-uniformed Kremlin guards approaching to break up the crowd.

  He really wished Roebeck had kept her mouth shut. He grabbed her roughly by the shoulder, saying, “Now look what you’ve done, honey,” as if he were an angry husband. Russians understood angry husbands. And Russians understood
the booted tread of guards approaching.

  The peddlers dispersed as quickly as they’d massed, back into shadows and nothingness. In seconds, the three ARC Riders stood alone on the cobbles. The team was now the only source of amusement for the guards.

  “Move,” Chun said. “Come on! Now! Before those soldiers decide we’re any more interesting.”

  “I told you not to try to buy anything!” Grainger said loudly, for the benefit of the oncoming guards, now close enough that the red trim on their hats could be seen. He took Roebeck’s elbow, reached for Chun’s arm.

  Arms linked, just ahead of the booted guards, the ARC Riders strode three abreast toward the street beyond, making loud small talk in English to advertise their American cover.

  Long after they’d passed out the Kremlin gates, Grainger held on to the two women. He was speechless with irritation and operational tension from the flub they’d made of a simple walkabout. As soon as he dared, he looked back. The guards had disappeared. He saw only the tomb where Lenin was supposedly buried, the square where so many missiles and mock missiles had been paraded before Politburo masters on ramparts while workers obediently thronged on cobbles below.

  This might be the dead past to Roebeck and Chun, but it was very real to Grainger. The USSR had been the great threat of his grandfather’s era. The very idea that a Russian-dominated Fourth Rome might plunge the world into the hopelessness of totalitarian misery terrified him. Tim Grainger knew too much about the former Soviet Union to ever believe that this mission was a cakewalk. He’d dealt with the aftershocks of the collapsed USSR for his entire adult life, until the ARC Riders had snatched him out of the jaws of death and history.

  “Easy, Tim. Let me go. It’s all right now,” Roebeck said softly, and tried to step into the street to cross it.

  “You can’t do that, Nan,” Grainger snapped. “You’ve got to cross underground.” He pulled her back roughly, pointing at a set of concrete stairs leading down under the street. He wasn’t going into another damned hole in the ground until and unless he absolutely had to. “I don’t want to go down there. Too risky. Let’s just walk along in plain sight until we find the hotel, okay? Stay above ground. And don’t offer to buy anything. You see any stores here—apart from the Gum, I mean? Take a look. You won’t find stores, not yet. Maybe next year. Now it’s just semi-illegal card tables and people selling then-family treasures from paper bags, plus a couple large open-air markets. You see a small state store, you see a line. Don’t talk to anybody. Don’t flash American money. You could still get people in trouble just by talking to them. For sure by handing them US dollars openly—”

  “But you made such a fuss about bringing the dollars!” Chun said hotly. She stopped. Hands on hips, she seemed like a dragon breathing smoke in the cold air. The late-day Moscow light was nearly omnidirectional, giving everything an unreal quality. The streets seemed free of shadows, as if the shadows themselves were afraid to declare themselves or mass publicly.

  “Just move along. This is still a real controlled society.” It was all coming back to him, tales told to a wide-eyed child by a grandfather on Sunrise Terrace.

  Police drove by in a dirty cruiser, followed by a green camouflage-painted van loaded with soldiers whose semiautomatic rifle barrels were sticking out every window.

  Chun said, “I don’t understand this. By March, 1992, you had privatization of industry. They’d been through the Winter of Discontent without a coup. The hard-liners were on the run…”

  “Books are written by so-called authorities after the events. Records are what people want them to be,” Nan Roebeck reminded her technical expert. “Remember, this was the era of ‘political correctness.’ Not just here, but in the West as well.”

  Good, at least Roebeck was processing ground truth. Nothing like a little reality to awaken people to how fragile the truth really is.

  “Just let’s go around this corner, ladies, and check into the damned hotel, okay? We’re lucky Chun got us rooms at the Métropole. It’s Westernized enough that we won’t be constantly stumbling over ourselves. And on the surface it should seem only semicontrolled. Don’t let that fool you.” He was racking his brains for old memories of how things ought to be here and now. He’d heard dozens of war stories from his grandfather’s cronies. But then it hadn’t been important.

  Now, those memories were all he had, besides Central’s inadequate database. “They’re going to ask to keep our passports and visas for a bit while they check out our credentials.” This was a society with only rudimentary computerization. It hadn’t been easy for Chun, even with Central’s help, to falsify a paper trail simulating Russian visa processing. “Those visa checks are still standard procedure. Within a couple hours, we’ll know how well we did at passport, invitation, and visa creation…”

  Chun looked past him, to Roebeck on his far side. “Boss, is this the way it’s going to be here?” She didn’t like Grainger taking the lead.

  Tough. He was too focused now to do any less.

  Nan Roebeck didn’t answer Chun directly. She was staring around at the red, yellow, and cream brick buildings dominating the streets. Empty plate-glass windows that might have held store displays in another culture here displayed only twisted crepe paper. Working people quietly moved toward subways, carrying bags held close. A man at curbside was using a foot pump to reinflate his auto’s tires before heading into traffic in a small, dilapidated automobile. “It’s amazing,” Roebeck said, “that these people put up with this for so long.”

  “People will put up with a lot of repression if that repression promises security,” Grainger replied. “Otherwise, the ARC Riders wouldn’t exist. We’re predicated, subsidized, and operated on that assumption.”

  Then Roebeck took her arm out of his. “Tim, just throttle back, will you? You’re way too torqued.”

  Chun snorted her approval.

  “Look,” Grainger said, “we’re going into a venue where all indoor conversations must be assumed to be monitored. Sort of like inside the TC.” Grainger kept walking, head down. They’d come if they wanted. “So let’s talk while we’re out here and moving. This isn’t a milk run. We’ve been sent chasing putative Russians who can travel temporally using some kind of nonstandard apparatus—I’m unwilling to credit ‘psychic’ force—which is sensitive to our TC’s bow wave. That sensitivity obviates all of our standard working assumptions and methodologies. We can’t catch these revisionists the easy way. Maybe we can’t catch them the normal way. The folks Up The Line who sent us on this mission understand what’s going on here. We don’t. We don’t even really know who sent us—who we work for. Don’t forget that. Barthuli didn’t bring it up for nothing.”

  “Where are you going with this, Tim?” Chun stepped toward him to avoid a hunched grandmother offering tins of caviar to passersby.

  “I’m not going anywhere, Chun. I already am somewhere: ’92 Russia. Let’s say the Wise Ones Up The Line know what they’re doing. Let’s say Russians are using indigenous technology to defeat technology six centuries in advance of theirs. I guess it’s possible.”

  “Tim,” Roebeck cautioned, “if I wanted paranoid speculation on the motives of those Up The Line, I’d have brought Barthuli and left you slogging in the Roman mud with Carnes and Weigand.”

  “Okay, point taken. Look, these Russians were brilliant theoreticians. Don’t let the dilapidated streets fool you. They didn’t care about cosmetics. They didn’t care about creature comfort. They cared about state supremacy, about military and ideological primacy. They gave up everything for scientific and technological excellence because they were told that such primacy was their only guarantee of security—and they believed they had it.”

  “That’s a fallacy, Tim. Look around you,” Chun objected. “This culture is falling apart. It’s poor and getting poorer. According to Central, their military superiority was a sham. I can’t—”

  “Despite what Central says about this time horizon, the Soviet Unio
n was not simply a Third World country that happened to have nukes. That’s propaganda put out by the winners—my side. I ought to know. The Soviet Union was without peer educationally where technical subjects were concerned. For decades, they were twice as literate and twice as committed to intellectual superiority as any culture of their time. Their need to compete head-to-head with the West was what destroyed them. You couldn’t win the technology race while protecting your people from corrupting influences. You had to learn about the other side’s capabilities. As they learned about life in the West, the Russian people stopped believing that the price they were paying societally was worth it. Keep in mind that the West outspent them; it didn’t outfight them. Russians may not make great-looking civilian trinkets yet, but their high-end space and military technology was kick-ass. Not sleek and pretty, but tough and effective. Their understanding of physics in many areas surpassed ours—may still, centuries later, surpass ours because so much was lost in the breakup.”

  “You think that’s what we encountered in 9 AD?” Roebeck probed. “Forgotten Russian breakthrough technology?”

  Grainger shrugged. It was exactly what he did think. There was no other answer that made sense. Much of Russia’s more metaphysical or unconventional scientific explorations had been rejected as funding candidates by the West because of the “not invented here” syndrome and institutionalized hatreds.

  To Roebeck, he said, “They had better metalurgical skills than the West. They had better algorithmists. When the US had a problem with a technology area, we added another supercomputer. If that didn’t work, we dropped the problem and went on to something easier. These guys hunkered down and solved problems we’d discarded as insolvable. Often they picked up discarded US patent work and improved it. In a dozen key technology areas, they were well ahead of the West.”