“Or sunsets, I suppose,” I said.
“Oh, no,” she said. “Don’t start talking about sunsets again. I thought you got that safely out of your system last time.”
“I have,” I said. “Completely and utterly. I’m thinking of a radically different theme for my tour this time. Something as far removed from sunsets as possible.”
“Oh, good.”
“Something like…waterfalls.”
“Waterfalls.”
“They’re pretty universal, you know. Any planet with some kind of atmosphere, and some kind of surface, usually ends up with something vaguely like a waterfall, somewhere. As long as you’re not too fussy about the water part.”
“Actually,” Purslane said, “I quite like waterfalls. I remember one I encountered in my travels…ten vertical kilometers of it, pure methane. I stood under it, allowed myself to feel a little of the cold. Just enough to shiver at the wonder of it.”
“It’s probably gone now,” I said sadly. “They don’t last long, compared to us.”
“But perhaps you’ll find an even better one.”
“I’ll keep my eyes open. I mapped some promising rivers during my tour; places where the geology might have allowed waterfalls to form by now. I think I’ll revisit some of those old places, for old time’s sake.”
“Bring me back a memory.”
“I’ll be sure to. It’s just such a shame you won’t ever see them with your own eyes…” I paused, aware that I stood on the thrilling, dangerous threshold of something. “I mean with me, the two of us.”
“You know the line frowns upon planned associations,” Purslane said, as if I needed to be reminded. “Such meetings erode the very spirit of chance and adventure Abigail sought to instill in us. If we meet between now and the next reunion, it must be by chance and chance alone.”
“Then we’ll never meet.”
“No. Probably not.”
“That’s a silly rule, isn’t it? I mean, given everything else that’s happened here…why should we care?”
Purslane was a great while answering. “Because we’re traditionalists, Campion. Line loyalists, to the marrow.” She tightened her grip on the rail as something came streaking up from the molten world below: the last of my aquatics, lingering out of idleness or some instinctive curiosity. The huge field-encased creature was as sleek as night, its under parts highlit in brassy reds from the fires. It paused at the level of the balcony, long enough to scrutinise us with one small, wrinkled, distressingly human eye. Then with a powerful flick of its fluke it soared higher, to the orbital shallows where its fellow were already assembling.
“There is something, though,” Purslane added.
“What?”
“I shouldn’t even mention it…but I’ve been less than discreet about my flight plan. That trick I used to break into Burdock’s ship? It worked equally well with yours.”
“What did you do?”
“Nothing harmful. Just installed a copy of my flight plan on your ship…for your information. Just so you know where I am.”
“You’re right,” I said, wonderingly. “That was spectacularly indiscreet.”
“I couldn’t help it.”
“It would be completely improper for us to meet.”
“Utterly,” Purslane agreed, nodding emphatically.
“But you’ll stick to that flight plan?”
“To the letter.” She had finished her wine. She flung the empty glass into space. I watched it fall, waiting for the glint when it impacted the bubble. But before it hit, Purslane took my arm and turned me away from the view. “Come on, Campion. Let’s go inside. They’re still all waiting to hear who’s won best strand.”
“I can’t believe anyone still cares about that, after all that’s happened.”
“Never underestimate the recuperative powers of human vanity,” Purslane said sagely. “Besides: it isn’t just the strand we have to think about. There are two memorials that need to be created. We’ll need one for Burdock, and one for Fescue.”
“One day we might need one for Samphire as well,” I said.
“I think we’ll do our best to forget all about him.”
“He won’t go away that easily. He may still be alive. Or it may be that he was murdered and replaced with an impostor, just like Burdock. Either way, I have a feeling we haven’t finished with him. Or the Great Work.”
“We’ve won this battle, though. That’s enough for tonight, isn’t it?”
“It’ll have to be,” I said.
“Something worries me, though,” Purslane said. “We still haven’t told anyone that my strand wasn’t all it appears to be. They’ll have to find out one of these days.”
“Not tonight, though.”
“Campion…if my name comes out of the hat…what will I do?”
I feigned concern, suppressing an amused smile. “Do what I’d do. Keep a very straight face.”
“You mean…just accept it? That would be a little on the mischievous side, wouldn’t it?”
“Very,” I said. “But worth it, all the same.”
Purslane tightened her grasp on my arm. Together we walked back toward the auditorium where the others waited. Under us, the fires of creation consumed my little world while, far above it, aquatics gathered in squadrons and schools, ready for their long migration.
TROIKA
BY THE time I reach the road to Zvezdniy Gorodok acute hypothermia is beginning to set in. I recognise the symptoms from my training: stage one moving into two, as my body redirects blood away from skin to conserve heat—shivering and a general loss of coordination the result. Later I can expect a deterioration of vasomotor tone as the muscles now contracting my peripheral blood vessels become exhausted. As blood surges back to my chilled extremities, I’ll start to feel hot rather than cold. Slipping ever further into disorientation, it will take an effort of will not to succumb to that familiar and distressing syndrome, paradoxical undressing. The few layers of clothes I’m wearing—the pyjamas, the thin coat I stole from Doctor Kizim—will start feeling too warm. They’ll find me naked and dead in the snow.
How long have I been out? An hour, two hours? There’s no way to tell. It’s like being back on the Tereshkova, when we slept so little that a day could feel like a week. All I know is that it’s still night. When the sun is up it will be harder to move around, but until then there’s still time to locate Nesha Petrova.
I touch the metal prize in my pocket, reassuring myself that it’s still there.
As if invoked by the act of touching the prize, a monstrous machine roars toward me out of the night. It’s yellow, with an angled shovel on the front. I stumble into the path of its headlights and raise a wary hand. The snowplough sounds its horn. I jerk back, avoiding the blade and the flurry of dirty snow it flings aside.
I think for a moment it’s going to surge on past. Instead the machine slows and stops. Maybe he thinks he’s hit me. It’s good—a robot snowplough wouldn’t stop, so there must be someone operating this one. I hobble around to the cab, where the driver’s glaring at me through an unopened window. He’s got a moustache, a woollen hat jammed down over his hair and ears, the red nose of a serious drinker.
Above the snorting, impatient diesel I call: “I could use a ride to town.”
The driver looks at me like I’m dirt, some piece of roadside debris he’d have been better shovelling into the verge. This far out of town, on this road, it doesn’t take much guesswork to figure out where I’ve come from. The hospital, the facility, the madhouse, whatever you want to call it, will have been visible in the distance on a clear day—a forbidding smudge of dark, tiny-windowed buildings, tucked behind high, razor-topped security fencing.
He lowers the window an inch. “Do yourself a favour, friend. Go back, get warm.”
“I won’t make it back. Early-onset hypothermia. Please, take me to Zvezdniy Gorodok. I can’t give you much, but you’re welcome to these.” My fingers feel like awkward tele-
operated waldos, the kind we’d had on the Progress. I fumble a pack of cigarettes from my coat pocket and push the crushed and soggy rectangle up to the slit in the window.
“All you’ve got?”
“They’re American.”
The driver grunts something unintelligible, but takes the cigarettes anyway. He opens the pack to inspect the contents, sniffing at them. “How old are these?”
“You can still smoke them.”
The driver leans over to open the other door. “Get in. I’ll take you as far as the first crossroads on the edge of town. You get out when we stop. You’re on your own from then on.”
I’ll agree to any arrangement provided it gets me a few minutes in the warmth of the cab. For now I’m still lucid enough to recognise the hypothermia creeping over me. That state of clinical detachment won’t last forever.
I climb in, taking deep, shivering breaths.
“Thank you.”
“The edge of town, that’s as far as we go,” he says, as if I didn’t get it the first time. His breath stinks of alcohol. “I’m caught giving you a ride, it won’t be good for me.”
“I doubt it’ll be good for either of us.”
The driver shifts the snowplough back into gear and lets her roll, the engine bellowing as the blade bites snow. “They’ll find you in Zvezdniy Gorodok. It’s not that big a place. It’s the arse end of nowhere and the trains aren’t running.”
“I only need to get to town.”
He looks at me, assessing the shabbiness of my dress, the state of my beard and hair. “Wild night ahead of you?”
“Something like that.”
He’s got the radio on, tuned to the state classical music channel. It’s playing Prokofiev. I lean over and turn the volume down, until it’s almost lost under the engine noise.
“I was listening to that.”
“Please. Until we get there.”
“Got a problem with music?”
“Some of it.”
The driver shrugs—he doesn’t seem to mind as much as he pretends. Panicking suddenly, imagining I might have dropped it in the snow, I pat my pocket again. But—along with Doctor Kizim’s security pass—the little metal box is still there.
It takes all of my resolve not to take it out and turn the little handle that makes it play. Not because I can stand to hear it again, but because I want to be sure it still works.
THE SNOWPLOUGH’S TAILLIGHTS fade into the night. The driver has kept to his word, taking us through the abandoned checkpoint, then to the first crossroads inside the old city boundary and no further. It’s been good to get warm, my clothes beginning to dry, but now that I’m outside again the cold only takes a few seconds to reach my bones. The blizzard has abated while we drove, but the snow’s still falling, coming down in soft flurries from a milky predawn sky.
At this early hour Zvezdniy Gorodok gives every indication of being deserted. The housing blocks are mostly unlit, save for the occasional illuminated window—a pale, curtained rectangle of dim yellow against the otherwise dark edifice. The buildings, set back from the intersecting roads in long ranks, look drearily similar, as if stamped from the same machine tool—even the party images flickering on their sides are the same from building to building. The same faces, the same slogans. For a moment I have the sense of having embarked on a ludicrous and faintly delusional task. Any one of these buildings could be where she lives. They’ll find me long before I have time to search each lobby, hoping to find a name.
I’d shown the driver the address I’d written down, pulled from the public telephone directory on Doctor Kizim’s desk. He’d given me a rough idea of where I ought to head. The apartment complex is somewhere near the railway station—I’ll have to search the surrounding streets until I find it.
“I know where the station is,” I tell the driver. “I was here when it was a sealed training facility.”
“You had something to do with the space program?”
“I did my bit.”
Zvezdniy Gorodok—Starry Town, or Star City. In the old days, you needed a permit just to get into it. Now that the space program is over—it has “achieved all necessary objectives”, according to the official line of the Second Soviet—Zvezdniy Gorodok is just another place to live, work and die. Utilitarian housing projects radiate far beyond the old boundary. The checkpoint is a disused ruin and the labs and training facilities have been turned into austere community buildings. More farmers and factory workers live here now than engineers, scientists and former cosmonauts.
I’m lucky to have got this far.
I escaped through a gap in the facility’s security fence, in a neglected corner of the establishment tucked away behind one of the kitchens. I’d known about the breach for at least six months—long enough to reassure myself that no one else had noticed it, and that the break could not be seen from the administrative offices or any of the surveillance cameras. It was good fortune that the gap existed, but I still wouldn’t have got far without the help from Doctor Kizim. I don’t know if he expects me to succeed in my escape attempt, but Doctor Kizim—who had always been more sympathetic to the Tereshkova’s survivors than any of the other medics—did turn a conveniently blind eye. It was his coat that I had taken. Not much good against blizzards, but without it I’d never have got as far as the snowplough, let alone Zvezdniy Gorodok. I just hope he doesn’t get into too much trouble when they find out I took it.
I don’t expect to get the chance to apologise to him.
The snow’s stopped falling, and a pink frigid sun is trying to break through the gloom on the eastern horizon. I locate the railway station, and begin to explore the surrounding streets, certain I can’t be wrong. More lights have come on now and I’m noticing the stirrings of daily activity. One or two citizens pass me in the snow, but they have their heads down and pay me little heed. Few vehicles are on the roads, and with the trains not running the area around the station is almost totally devoid of activity. When a large car—a Zil limousine, black and muscular as a panther—swings onto the street I’m walking down, I don’t have time to hide. But the Zil sails by, tyres spraying muddy slush, and as it passes I see that it’s empty. The car must be on its way to collect a party official from one of the better districts.
I’ve been walking for an hour, trying not to glance over my shoulder too often, when I find Nesha’s building. The apartment complex has a public entrance lobby smelling of toilets and alcohol. Plywood panels cover some of the windows in the outer wall, where the glass has broken. It’s draughty and unlit, the tiled floor filthy with footprints and paper and smashed glass. The door into the rest of the building can only be opened by someone inside. In my cold, sodden slippers I squelch to the buzzer panel next to the mailboxes.
I catch my breath. Everything hinges on this moment. If I’m wrong about Nesha, or if she’s moved elsewhere, or died—it’s been a long time, after all—then everything, everything, will have been for nothing.
But her name’s still there.
N. Petrova. She lives on the ninth floor.
It may mean nothing. She may still have died or been moved on. I reach out a numb finger and press the buzzer anyway. There’s no sound, no reassuring response. I wait a minute then press it again. Outside, a stray dog with mad eyes yellows the snow under a lamp-post. I press the buzzer again, shivering more than when I was outside.
A woman’s voice crackles through the grille above the buzzers. “Yes?”
“Nesha Petrova?” I ask, leaning to bring my lips closer to the grille.
“Who is it?”
“Dimitri Ivanov.” I wait a second or two for her to respond to the name.
“From building services?”
I assume that there’s no camera letting Nesha see me, if there ever was. “Dimitri Ivanov, the cosmonaut. I was on the ship, the Tereshkova. The one that met the Matryoshka.”
Silence follows. I realise, dimly, that there’s an eventuality I’ve never allowed for. Nesha Pet
rova may be too old to remember anything of importance. She may be too old to care.
I shuffle wet feet to stave off the cold.
“Nesha?”
“There were three cosmonauts.”
I lean into the grille again. “The other two were Galenka Makarova and Yakov Demin. They’re both dead now. The VASIMIR engine malfunctioned on the way home, exposing them to too much radiation. I’m the only one left.”
“Why should I believe you?”
“Because I’m standing here in pyjamas and a stolen coat. Because I’ve come all the way from the facility just to see you, through the snow. Because there’s something I want you to know.”
“Then tell me.”
“I’d rather show you. Besides, I’m going to die of cold if I stand here much longer.”
I look to the outside world again, through one of the panes that hasn’t been broken and covered over with plywood. Another Zil slides by. This one has bodies in it: grey-skinned men sitting upright in dark coats and hats.
“I don’t want any trouble from the police.”
“I won’t stay long. Then I’ll be on my way, and no one will have to know that I was here.”
“I’ll know.”
“Please, let me in.” I haven’t bargained for this. In all the versions of this encounter that I’ve run through my mind before the escape, she never needed any persuasion to meet me. “Nesha, you need to understand. They tried to bury you, but you were right all along. That’s what I want to tell you about. Before they silence me, and no one ever gets to find out.”
After an age she says: “You think it matters now, Dimitri Ivanov? You think anything matters?”
“More than you can imagine,” I say.
The door buzzes. She’s letting me in.
“IT’S BLACKER THAN I was expecting.”
I paused in my hamfisted typing. “Of course it’s black. What other colour were you expecting?”
Yakov was still staring out the porthole, at the looming Matryoshka. It was two hundred kilometres away, but still ate up more than half the sky. No stars in that direction, just a big absence like the mother of all galactic supervoids. We had the cabin lights dimmed so he could get a good view. We had already spread the relay microsats around the alien machine, ready for when the Progress penetrated one of the transient windows in Shell 3. But you couldn’t see the microsats from here—they were tiny, and the machine was vast.
Beyond the Aquila Rift: The Best of Alastair Reynolds Page 57