Russian Spring (64 page)

Senator Carson: “Hell, no! And anyway the damn Peens wouldn’t let us in in the first place. But . . . if something should happen to break the whole damn thing up . . . if the Europeans could be made to realize that it’s all part of a Russian master plan to take over the world . . . Well, then it’d be a whole new ball game.”

Billy Allen: “But
how
, Senator?”

Senator Carson: “I figure
that
one out, Billy, and maybe
I’ll
run for President!”

—
Newspeak
, with Billy Allen

It took two weeks of looking for Jerry Reed to find an apartment. He did his searching after work, and somehow the long hours of hassling real estate agents, trudging around Paris, and looking at an endless succession of too-expensive apartments kept him together, kept him from thinking. He would eat his petit déjeuner at the little hotel, take the Métro to work, immerse himself in the job, spend the rest of the evening apartment hunting, eat a grim and lonely dinner, with a full bottle of wine, at some brasserie, reel back to the hotel drunk enough to crash out, then wake up the next morning to begin the cycle over, running mindlessly on automatic.

Indeed, perhaps, he was prolonging the process deliberately, for in the end he rented a small one-bedroom that was no larger and no cheaper than a dozen others that he had seen. Perhaps too there was something masochistically perverse in his final choice, for the apartment was on the Île St.-Louis, only two blocks from the apartment where he and Sonya had spent the early happy years of their marriage.

That apartment had been sunny and airy, with a magnificent view north across the Seine, across the city, into the brightness of the future, the perfect place for a pair of young newlyweds about to embark on a life together. This apartment was cool and shadowy and had a view of an old and musty stone courtyard, and that too seemed somehow appropriate for
this
stage in his life.

By the time he had rented the apartment, gotten the videotel, and gas, and electricity turned on, gotten a sparse suite of furniture moved
in, and gotten his clothing out of Avenue Trudaine, the divorce papers had come through.

He insisted on waiting for Sonya to sign them before he went to the lawyer’s office himself, so as to avoid the sight of her. That was on a Thursday. He took off work on Friday, laid in a supply of Cognac, and finally allowed himself to fall apart.

He drank and drank and drank for the next two days, sealed in the cell he had imprisoned himself in, staring mindlessly out the living room window, down at the old gray stone of the courtyard, thinking fragmented thoughts of California, and outer space, of twenty years of marriage, and twenty years of dreams and hopes, and that last terrible night when his world had ended.

Sunday at about noon, he awoke, sick to his stomach, with a raging headache, and quite famished. Without bothering to shower off two days’ worth of grundge or shave off two days’ growth of beard, he dragged himself out of the apartment into the cruel eye-killing sunshine of the Quai de Bourbon.

For those with the spirit to enjoy it, it was a glorious sunny Parisian day, with the tour boats plying the Seine, and the streets filled with people, and the amateur painters out in full force. Jerry slouched his way to the west end of the Île and collapsed onto a chair by a sidewalk table outside a brasserie near the Pont St.-Louis overlooking Nôtre-Dame.

He ordered an omelette parmentier and a café double from a waiter, who looked quite askance at his disheveled appearance, and sat there eating his lunch and drinking his coffee and watching the world go by like a man from Mars, alone, abandoned, letting the French babble of the other patrons and the passersby wash over him like a wave of Muzak.

And at last he allowed himself to really think. His marriage was over. His daughter was a Soviet citizen, and he had turned his back on her. His son had built a life for himself in America, and America, the country that had betrayed him, might as well be on the far side of the Moon. His Grand Tour Navette had been taken away from him, and he was never going to get it back.

What was left to him? What was he supposed to do with the rest of his life?

A distant roar made him look up. There, in the cloudless blue sky over Paris, the contrail of a Concordski wrote a clean white line across the heavens; a flight in reality, no doubt, on its way to Rome, or Tokyo, or Melbourne, but in his mind’s eye, he saw the silver dot at its point rising toward the clear cold blackness, toward orbit, toward Spaceville, toward the Moon, and beyond.

Toward where he still longed to be.

Up, and up, and up it rose, pure and hard, a bright silvery focal point drawing the vapor of the atmosphere behind it, no longer Earth-bound, shrugging off the ties of the planet, and at last he knew, at last he could see the ballistic trajectory of his life, shorn of all terrestrial illusion.

Up there was where he belonged, up there where there was no gravity to tie his flesh to the world’s pain and illusion.
That
was what was left to him, to ride into the up and out, to float free of the bounds of the atmosphere, of the leaden constraints of gravity, up there in the cold, pure, black vacuum, where his spirit dwelled already, where his heart had always been.

That
was what was left to him. That was the dream that had brought him to this pass in the first place, all those years ago. Sonya, Franja, Robert, America, they all seemed like a dream now, ghosts, phantoms, stations of the way.

Only one thing was real now. Only one thing mattered. Before he died, he would get there somehow. He would float free and clear and weightless above the wreckage of his life. He would see the Earth entire from on high.

Whatever it took. Whatever the price. Had he not paid everything he had already?

Europe. America. The Soviet Union. Words on a map. The past. Up there, that was the future.

“L’addition, s’il vous plaît,” he told the waiter.

Whatever it was, he was ready to pay it.

Part Three

American Spring

CNN: “Mr. President, President Gorchenko has charged that the presence of so many American media consultants, pollsters, and campaign experts in the Ukraine is blatant interference in the internal affairs of the Soviet Union . . .”

President Carson: “I thought the whole question of the campaign was whether or not the free people of the Ukraine wanted to continue to be dominated by the Russian oppressors.”

CNN: “You haven’t answered my question.”

President Carson: “Sure I have. Kronkol promises to take the Ukraine out of the Soviet Union, so if he wins, who he hired to run his campaign is no business of Moscow’s, and if he loses, well, what’s Gorchenko got to bitch about?”

San Francisco Chronicle
: “But Gorchenko has also charged that the Ukrainian Liberation Front chose Vadim Kronkol as their Presidential candidate on the advice of American media advisors they had hired beforehand and not the other way around. After all, he
was
a TV personality with no previous political experience.”

President Carson: “So what? Way I see it, the
ULF
had the right to hire anyone they wanted to. And American campaign experts just happen to be the state of the art. Most of the Latin American politicians use them, the Israelis use them, even the Chinese use them, so why should the Ukrainian Liberation Front be any different?”

New York Times
: “Vice President Wolfowitz has charged that Kronkol was picked by the
CIA
as the most rabid secessionist candidate they could find who knew how to sell himself on television. . . .”

President Carson: “That’s a better description of Nathan Wolfowitz himself than it is of Vadim Kronkol.”

(Laughter)

Atlanta Constitution
: “But the Vice President also charges that it’s all a
CIA
-run plot to break up the Soviet Union—”

President Carson: “The Vice President, as usual, is full of crap.”

(Gasps)

Houston Post
: “But you wouldn’t be sorry to see the Soviet Union disintegrate, would you, Mr. President?”

President Carson: “Like the rest of the American people, I’d cry great big crocodile tears all the way to the bank.”

(Laughter)

—Presidential Press Conference

XXI

As usual, Jerry Reed awoke long before the alarm went off. He crawled out of the grimy bedclothes, and, as was his habit, staggered naked to the bedroom window, parted the raggy curtains, and looked down into the courtyard.

Though it wasn’t quite raining, the old gray stones were slick with moisture, and the small slice of sky visible beyond the rooftop across the court from this angle was gray and dirty in the wan early morning light. But nothing could dampen his enthusiasm for today’s big event.

He stumbled over dirty laundry into the water closet, took a piss, then went into the living room, opened a window halfway, blinking himself fully awake in the cool blast of humid air, and forced himself to go through his daily exercise regime.

Twenty-five deep-knee bends with five-kilo weights in either hand. Fifty jumping jacks with the hand weights. Twenty-five sit-ups. Twenty-five push-ups. Ten minutes running in place with the weights.

One did not even pull 3 g’s on a Concordski boost to orbit, and zero g did not exactly require the body of an athlete, but even though commercial flights took rich invalids to the Spaceville retirement modules every week,
ESA
still required a fairly high standard of fitness of its own space-certifiable personnel.

The official rationale was that
ESA
personnel had to be in shape to
work
when they got up out of the gravity well, and, unlike the invalids headed for Spaceville to spend the rest of their extended lives in zero g, had to be able to survive the transition back to leaden Earth-normal when they were finished.

Jerry suspected that it had more to do with maintaining the ancient outmoded tradition of physical machismo that had really meant something when cosmonauts and astronauts had ridden into the up-and-out atop huge brute-force booster rockets rather than anything currently pragmatic.

But those were the rules, and there was no arguing with them, and if all this daily grunting and panting and sweating was the price a middle-aged man had to pay to keep his
ESA
certificate, he would pay it willingly in the same grimly pragmatic spirit with which he had renounced his American citizenship for Common European nationality when it became clear that he would have to do so in order to get the position that made all this exercise necessary in the first place.

It had been a long hard grind, but in two weeks it would all be worth it. The dream of his lifetime would finally be realized. He would ride a Concordski up out of the gravity well into the Low Earth Orbit where the assembly of the first Grand Tour Navette was at last nearing
completion. He would spend ten days aboard supervising the final installation of the maneuvering system, and then he would be there to monitor its performance on the shakedown cruise to the Moon and back.

It wouldn’t be a long cruise—two and a half days to the Moon and two and a half days back. He wouldn’t actually set foot on the lunar surface—the
GTN
would make two lunar orbits and then return. But he
would
at last float free of the constraints of gravity. And see the Earth entire from on high. And experience the cold unwinking brilliance of the firmament from beyond the haze of the atmosphere. And see the Moon itself from as close as two hundred kilometers.

“You can walk on water, kiddo,” Rob Post had told him all those long years ago. “You’ll have to give up everything else to do it, but you can walk on water.”

Jerry believed in the truth of that now, more fully if more bitterly than he ever had before, but the thing of it was, he had finally learned, you had to be damned sure of precisely what you meant by “walking on water” first.

On that awful hung-over morning after his long drunken binge to mourn the death of his marriage, with Sonya gone, and the children continents and oceans away, and even the pathetic remnant of his career seemingly about to be taken away from him when the project’s design phase ended, when, much against his will, everything else that he had ever lived for had indeed been stripped from him, the contrail of an ascending Concordski had written a clean message across the sky of Paris, a pure white line pointing with ballistic inevitability to where he belonged.

As he had sat there at a sidewalk café drinking his coffee and watching the Concordski dwindle, he had remembered at last what he
really
meant by walking on water. One way or another, he was going to get up there before he died.

The first order of business was to pull himself together. He cleaned the Cognac out of his apartment. He started working out. He refused to see Sonya and kept their phone conversations brief. He quite lost contact with Franja. He spoke to Robert on the phone occasionally, but kept his emotional distance. He ate, he slept, he worked out, he went to work. He spent his unwelcome idle hours reading science fiction and technical journals. His personal life became nonexistent.

It didn’t matter. He was going to walk on water. He had already given up his country, his marriage, his family, and his project to do it, and he was more than willing to give up what little else remained to distract him from the purity of his obsession.

The second order of business was to somehow persuade Patrice
Corneau to keep him on after the design phase ended. And if he had to give up what little was left of his pride to do it, he was ready now to do that too. He went to the project manager who had been his protégé and friend back when such things mattered and pleaded shamelessly for Corneau to find him something, anything.

“What do you have in mind, Jerry?” Patrice said when he was finished invoking past emotional debts and present open desperation. “You haven’t had any hands-on experience in years and years, nor have you led an équipe. What am I supposed to do with you?”