Russian Spring (58 page)

—AP

“Are you really serious about this relationship, Bobby?” Sara Conner said in bed one night toward the end of the spring term.

“Of course I’m serious,” Bobby declared without thinking.

“Well, if we’re going to stay together, we should have our own apartment,” Sara said with her familiar firmness. “I’m getting pretty fed up with living like this. Aren’t you?”

Bobby thought about it. They had been living in his room at Little Moscow for over five months now, and he had to admit that it was pretty damned cramped, crammed as it was with books, papers, chips, discs, files, underwear, cosmetics, socks, and endless assorted junk, and there was always crap to be cleared off the bed every night and no place left to dump it but the floor.

True, they didn’t do anything in the room but sleep, study, and make love, and true too that it was rather amazing that they didn’t get on each other’s nerves more than they did, especially with Sara being Sara, but he had to admit that the room was something of a pigpen, nor did he much like having to clear the bed of debris every time they wanted to fuck.

But an
apartment?
That was really a serious step. And besides . . .

“But how can we afford it?”

“I’ve already found a place we can afford,” Sara told him. “It’s not much, a pretty tiny one-bedroom, but we can swing it.”

“You have? We can?”

That Sara, having already decided what she wanted, had gone out and found an apartment already was by now not so surprising. Bobby had long since learned that she was like that, and indeed, he suspected, she had really gone out and gotten
him
when she wanted him in much the same self-contained and even Machiavellian fashion.

“We’re only going to be living in it over the summer and for another two terms till we graduate,” she told him. “With what you’re paying here, plus the living allowance my parents send me, plus what I’ve already saved up by moving out of the dorms, we can handle it with what we can both make working over the summer.”

“You’ve got it all worked out, haven’t you?” Bobby said, a bit perturbed, but not without admiration.

“Yup.”

“I had hoped we could go to Paris this summer to meet my parents . . . ,” Bobby muttered rather disconsolately.

“Oh,
Bobby
, we’ve gone over that a thousand times, don’t you even read the papers?” Sara moaned.

Bobby sighed. That was another thing about Sara that he had learned to accept and even admire. Not only had her family been political for generations, she was a journalism major with a firm career goal in mind, to become a political reporter, on a newspaper if she could, on TV if she had to. More to the current point, for Sara the personal and the political were inseparable.

Even when it came to
his
own name.

“Bob is such a
jingo
name,” she told him. “It makes me think of birdbrained jocks in gym shorts, swilling beer from cans. But when I call you
Bobby
, it makes me think of Bobby
Kennedy
, the last politician this country produced that was worth a damn. Living with a man I can call
Bobby
makes me feel, I don’t know, like something’s still alive. And Bobby
Reed
, well . . .”

She wanted to know if he was any relation of
John
Reed. Bobby hadn’t even known who John Reed was, much to Sara’s exasperation.

“You and he have a lot in common,” she told him. “John Reed was an American journalist who went to Russia to cover the Revolution and stayed there out of conviction. And you
chose
to be an American the way he chose to become a Soviet. For God’s sake, Bobby, you should at least see
Reds
!”

She dug out a tape of the old movie, and while Bobby found the sad story of political idealism betrayed depressing, the love story was something else again, something that became a secret bond between them, and after that, he found that he didn’t mind being called Bobby anymore.

That was Sara. She could take his common old American name, run it through her political sensibilities, and hand it back to him as a special gift with whole new meanings.

But those same political sensibilities had quite convinced her that Paris was out of the question.

Under the current political conditions, the provisions of the National Security Act, her family background, and the dossier she was certain existed in some Central Security Agency computer in Washington, Sara was sure there was no way she could be granted an exit visa to visit Common Europe.

And she was equally convinced that if Bobby ever left the United States, given his father’s history, his mother’s nationality and employment, his own ambiguous nationality status, and the dossier she was sure the
CSA
had on
him
, there was no way he would ever get back in.

Which was to say there was really
no
way he could leave the country and count on getting back in to be with Sara.

And that was something he was not about to risk, despite all Dad’s pleading on the phone.

So . . .

So Bobby went with Sara to look at the apartment she had found in a crumbling old building on a back street off of Shattuck. It was tiny, barely thirty square meters, and the toilet didn’t flush quite right, and the Pullman kitchen equipment was ancient, and he did spot a roach or two, but compared to the room at Little Moscow it was
enormous, and there
was
a door they could shut between the small living room and the even smaller bedroom, plus two closets, and Sara
had
worked out the numbers, so in the end, they took it.

Bobby managed to get a summer job through the University translating dull French history papers for academic journals, and Sara held her nose and took a job as a waitress. The money wasn’t much, but by the end of the summer, they had enough saved up to pay the rent through the end of their senior year. After that . . .

Well, Sara had her own firm ideas about that too, and, as was her way, had waged a campaign to convince him, and by the time the fall term had arrived, had pretty much succeeded.

“Sure, Berkeley is wonderful,” she told him, “but we can’t live like this forever. You don’t want to end up like all those people who go straight from graduation into grad school and from grad school into a teaching job at the University and end up never leaving, thinking that the rest of the world is just something out there somewhere south of Oakland that they don’t have to pay any attention to. . . .”

“I don’t?” Bobby said. For the truth of it was that before he had met Sara Conner, that had indeed been pretty much his life plan.

“No, you don’t,” Sara kept insisting. “Certainly
I
have no intention of ending up a campus wife in Berkeley! I want to be out there in the
real world
doing something that matters, with you or without you; I can’t live my life like an ostrich with its head in the sand!”

It was quite a bit for Bobby to handle. The oblique reference to marriage was the least of it, somehow; their lives and their finances were currently so intertwined that in a sense he felt married to Sara now, and one more document in a life that had so long been papered with passport and visa and nationality red tape did not seem all that significant. Indeed, the thought of living without Sara seemed like divorce already.

And
that
was what got to him. He loved her, and the thought of losing her was intolerable. He was convinced that she loved him too, but he was equally convinced that he would have to fit his career choice into the life she wanted to lead if he was to retain her love past college.

And what Sara wanted was to be out there in what she called the “real world,”
doing something
, which, Sara being Sara, meant doing something to change the world, or at least something that could give her that illusion; being a political reporter somewhere, not languishing in the protected groves of academe with a professor of history at
UC
Berkeley.

Far from resenting this, it made Bobby love her all the more. Indeed, he even found himself envying such an idealistic passion, for he knew damn well that he had nothing like it himself.

But Sara being Sara, she also understood all this, and instead of threatening or browbeating him, launched a campaign to fire him with her own ardor, to convince him intellectually, to present a vision that they could truly share.

“You could do so much, Bobby,” she insisted. “You have perfect French and more Russian than you’re willing to admit. You’ve got a decent background in history, and you’ve lived in Europe, and you can write better prose than I do. You’d be a terrific reporter, a foreign correspondent even, if some paper wanted you badly enough to hassle the visas. . . .”

Bobby, in the end, wasn’t all that hard to convince. All the translating he had done over the summer had shown him that he could write facilely enough in English. There weren’t many American reporters fluent in French and possessed of passable Russian, and fewer still who had grown up on the other side of the Great Atlantic Divide. He could make good money as a journalist, better than anything he could hope for as one of a horde of teaching assistants struggling up the academic ladder. . . .

“You owe it to yourself and your country, Bobby!” Sara also insisted. “The media’s so hopelessly jingo, and you’ve got a really unique viewpoint to contribute. It would be just awful if you wasted all that vegetating in an academic hothouse like Berkeley, when you’ve got what it takes to
do something
, to be someone who really matters!”

Bobby would have liked to believe that
that
was what convinced him to change his major to journalism at the beginning of his senior year. But Sara had taught him how inseparable the political and the personal could really be.

He was choosing a higher-paying career that would take fuller advantage of his experience and skills, he was choosing a career that might indeed allow him to better the world, to be someone who mattered.

But above all, he was also choosing to make a life together with the woman he loved, the woman who had pushed him into this more adventurous and idealistic career in the first place, and that was surely a textbook example of
enlightened
self-interest.

ANOTHER EXTRATERRESTRIAL CIVILIZATION?

Soviet astronomers say they may have discovered another extraterrestrial civilization, this one much more advanced than that of the fourth planet of Barnard’s star. Lunar-based astronomers have detected an object about five thousand light-years away toward the galactic center
that could be a so-called Dyson sphere, a star entirely enclosed by an artificial shell in order to capture its total output of energy.

Gravity-wave perturbations indicate an object of about half a solar mass, stellar occlusions suggest a solid body with a diameter approximately that of the orbit of Jupiter, and infrared studies indicate a surface temperature in the liquid water range.

“If this is not a Dyson sphere,” a spokesperson for the Soviet Academy of Sciences said, “it must be something even stranger. Unfortunately, there is no way of obtaining any kind of visual image at this range.”

Sending a radio message would not be a practical means of resolving the mystery either, since a round-trip communication would take a minimum of ten thousand years.

—
Science News

Franja’s affair with Colonel Cosmonaut Nikolai Mikhailovich Smirnov was the talk of Cosmograd Sagdeev and something of a scandal as well. Needless to say, she was the envy of every woman in the monkey cages, but, space-monkey etiquette being what it was, that would have resulted in nothing worse than obscene good-natured banter if she had played it by the unstated rules.

But she didn’t. While she didn’t move her clothing or personal effects into Nikolai’s module, since moving out of one’s assigned quarters was a clear violation of the official regulations, she did spend all her sleep periods alone between the nets with him, and that was a violation of the unwritten space-monkey code.

Not that sex between monkeys and supervisors or even command personnel was frowned upon; those privileged to bunk two to a module or to have a module all their own were human too, and hence fair game. However, using such liaisons to enjoy entire sleep periods in such luxurious quarters smacked of using sex as a commodity of exchange; class treason, whoredom, and that was considered nikulturni indeed.

Worse still, far worse, Franja and Nikolai were conducting a private and monogamous affair. Neither of them would fuck anyone else. They wouldn’t even fuck
each other
before an audience. In short, they had established a
relationship
, and that was the worst transgression of space-monkey etiquette conceivable. Relationships meant passion, jealousy, envy, and who knew what other powerful emotions that could cause only trouble in such close confined quarters.

Indeed, it skirted perilously close to violating actual regulations, and only Nikolai’s lofty status as a Colonel Cosmonaut, Mars expedition
commander, and Hero of the Soviet Union kept official displeasure at bay.

Franja could not help knowing all this on a certain level, but frankly, Comrades, as the old American saying had it, she didn’t give a damn. She had enough trouble keeping herself from falling in love.

She had never met a man like Nikolai. She had never met anyone who had come even close. That he was a gorgeous physical specimen and that his prowess at zero-gravity aerobatics made him a fantastic lover was the least of it, which was not to say it wasn’t plenty.

That he had been to Mars, that he was a Colonel Cosmonaut, might be part of it, not because of his exalted status, and probably not even because he really was what she had once dreamed of becoming, but because of what his experiences had made him.

In a curious way, Nikolai reminded her of her father, of a younger, stronger, somehow more innocent Jerry Reed, who had had all the right connections, who had gotten all the right breaks, who had gotten to live his dream in the real world, and who therefore had never lost the sweetness and purity of the boy he had once been, building his own telescope, devouring science fiction, gazing up at the stars, and voyaging across the blackness in his mind’s eye.