Spring 2007 (14 page)

If only Bob and her father hadn’t argued; or if Mum
hadn’t tried to pick a fight with her over Bob–Maddy leans on the railing
and sighs, and a moment later nearly jumps out of her skin as a strange man
clears his throat behind her.

“Excuse me, I didn’t mean to disturb you.”

“That’s alright,” Maddy replies, irritated and trying to
conceal it. “I was just going in.”

“A shame: it’s a beautiful night,” says the stranger. He
turns and puts down a large briefcase next to the railing, fiddling with the
latches. “Not a cloud in sight, just right for stargazing.” She focuses on him,
seeing short hair, small paunch, and a worried thirty-something face. He
doesn’t look back, being preoccupied with something that resembles a photographer’s
tripod.

“Is that a telescope?” she asks, eyeing the stubby
cylindrical gadget in his case.

“Yes.” An awkward pause. “Name’s John Martin. Yourself?”

“Maddy Holbright.” Something about his diffident manner
puts her at ease. “Are you settling? I haven’t seen you around.”

He straightens up and tightens joints on the tripod’s
legs, screwing them into place. “I’m not a settler, I’m a researcher. Five
years, all expenses paid, to go and explore a new continent.” He carefully
lifts the telescope body up and lowers it onto the platform, then begins
tightening screws. “And I’m supposed to point this thing at the sky and make
regular observations. I’m actually an entomologist, but there are so many
things to do that they want me to be a jack of all trades, I guess.”

“So they’ve got you to carry a telescope, huh? I don’t
think I’ve ever met an entomologist before.”

“A bug-hunter with a telescope,” he agrees: “kind of
unexpected.”

Intrigued, Maddy watches as he screws the viewfinder
into place then pulls out a notebook and jots something down. “What are you
looking at?”

He shrugs. “There’s a good view of S-Doradus from here,”
he says. “You know, Satan? And his two little angels.”

Maddy glances up at the violent pinprick of light, then
looks away before it can burn her eyes. It’s a star, but bright enough to cast
shadows from half a light year’s distance. “The disks?”

“Them.” There’s a camera body in his bag, a chunky old
Bronica from back before the Soviets swallowed Switzerland and Germany whole.
He carefully screws it onto the telescope’s viewfinder. “The Institute wants me
to take a series of photographs of them–nothing fancy, just the best this
eight-inch reflector can do–over six months. Plot the ship’s position on
a map. There’s a bigger telescope in the hold, for when I arrive, and they’re
talking about sending a real astronomer one of these days, but in the meantime
they want photographs from sixty thousand miles out across the disk. For
parallax, so they can work out how fast the disks are moving.”

“Disks.” They seem like distant abstractions to her, but
John’s enthusiasm is hard to ignore. “Do you suppose they’re like, uh, here?”
She doesn’t say like Earth–everybody knows this isn’t Earth any more. Not
the way it used to be.

“Maybe.” He busies himself for a minute with a chunky
film cartridge. “They’ve got oxygen in their atmospheres, we know that. And
they’re big enough. But they’re most of a light year away–far closer than
the stars, but still too far for telescopes.”

“Or moon rockets,” she says, slightly wistfully. “Or
sputniks.”

“If those things worked any more.” The film is in: he
leans over the scope and brings it round to bear on the first of the disks, a
couple of degrees off from Satan. (The disks are invisible to the naked eye; it
takes a telescope to see their reflected light.) He glances up at her. “Do you
remember the moon?”

Maddy shrugs. “I was just a kid when it happened. But I
saw the moon, some nights. During the day, too.”

He nods. “Not like some of the kids these days. Tell
them we used to live on a big spinning sphere and they look at you like you’re
mad.”

“What do they think the speed of the disks will tell
them?” She asks.

“Whether they’re all as massive as this one. What they
could be made of. What that tells us about who it was that made them.” He
shrugs. “Don’t ask me, I’m just a bug-hunter. This stuff is big, bigger than
bugs.” He chuckles. “It’s a new world out here.”

She nods very seriously, then actually sees him for the
first time: “I guess it is.”

Chapter Three:
Boldly
Go

“So tell me, comrade colonel, how did it really feel?”

The comrade colonel laughs uneasily. He’s forty-three
and still slim and boyish-looking, but carries a quiet melancholy around with
him like his own personal storm cloud. “I was very busy all the time,” he says
with a self-deprecating little shrug. “I didn’t have time to pay attention to
myself. One orbit, it only lasted ninety minutes, what did you expect? If you
really want to know, Gherman’s the man to ask. He had more time.”

“Time.” His interrogator sighs and leans his chair back
on two legs. It’s a horribly old, rather precious Queen Anne original, a gift
to some Tsar or other many years before the October revolution. “What a joke.
Ninety minutes, two days, that’s all we got before they changed the rules on
us.”

“’They,’ comrade chairman?” The colonel looked puzzled.

“Whoever.” The chairman’s vague wave takes in half the
horizon of the richly paneled Kremlin office. “What a joke. Whoever they were,
at least they saved us from a pasting in Cuba because of that louse Nikita.” He
pauses for a moment, then toys with the wine glass that sits, half-empty,
before him. The colonel has a glass too, but his is full of grape juice, out of
consideration for his past difficulties. “The ‘whoever’ I speak of are of course
the brother socialists from the stars who brought us here.” He grins
humorlessly, face creasing like the muzzle of a shark that smells blood in the
water.

“Brother socialists.” The colonel smiles hesitantly,
wondering if it’s a joke, and if so, whether he’s allowed to share it. He’s
still unsure why he’s being interviewed by the premier–in his private
office, at that. “Do we know anything of them, sir? That is, am I supposed
to–”

“Never mind.” Aleksey sniffs, dismissing the colonel’s
worries. “Yes, you’re cleared to know everything on this topic. The trouble is
there is nothing to know, and this troubles me, Yuri Alexeyevich. We infer
purpose, the engine of a greater history at work–but the dialectic is
silent on this matter. I have consulted the experts, asked them to read the
chicken entrails, but none of them can do anything other than parrot pre-event
dogma: ‘any species advanced enough to do to us what happened that day must of
course have evolved true Communism, comrade premier! Look what they did for us!
(That was Shchlovskii, by the way.) And yes, I look and I see six cities that
nobody can live in, spaceships that refuse to stick to the sky, and a landscape
that Sakharov and that bunch of double-domes are at a loss to explain. There
are fucking miracles and wonders and portents in the sky, like a galaxy we were
supposed to be part of that is now a million years too old and shows extensive
signs of construction. There’s no room for miracles and wonders in our rational
world, and it’s giving the comrade general secretary, Yuri, the
comrade
general secretary
, stomach ulcers; did you know that?”

The colonel sits up straight, anticipating the punch
line: it’s a well-known fact throughout the USSR that when Brezhnev says
‘frog,’ the premier croaks. And here he is in the premier’s office, watching
that very man, Aleksey Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers, third
most powerful man in the Soviet Union, taking a deep breath.

“Yuri Alexeyevich, I have brought you here today because
I want you to help set Leonid Illich’s stomach at rest. You’re an aviator and a
hero of the Soviet Union, and more importantly you’re smart enough to do the
job and young enough to see it through, not like the old farts cluttering up
Stavka. (It’s going to take most of a lifetime to sort out, you mark my words.)
You’re also, you will pardon the bluntness, about as much use as a fifth wheel
in your current posting right now: we have to face facts, and the sad reality
is that none of Korolev’s birds will ever fly again, not even with the atomic
bomb pusher-thing they’ve been working on.” Kosygin sighs and shuffles upright
in his chair. “There is simply no point in maintaining the Cosmonaut Training
Centre. A decree has been drafted and will be approved next week: the manned rocket
program is going to be wound up and the cosmonaut corps reassigned to other
duties.”

The colonel flinches. “Is that absolutely necessary,
comrade chairman?”

Kosygin drains his wine glass, decides to ignore the
implied criticism. “We don’t have the resources to waste. But, Yuri
Alexeyevich, all that training is not lost.” He grins wolfishly. “I have new
worlds for you to explore, and a new ship for you to do it in.”

“A new ship.” The colonel nods then does a double take,
punch-drunk. “A ship?”

“Well, it isn’t a fucking horse,” says Kosygin. He
slides a big glossy photograph across his blotter towards the colonel. “Times
have moved on.” The colonel blinks in confusion as he tries to make sense of
the thing at the centre of the photograph. The premier watches his face,
secretly amused: confusion is everybody’s first reaction to the thing in the
photograph.

“I’m not sure I understand, sir–”

“It’s quite simple: you trained to explore new worlds.
You can’t, not using the rockets. The rockets won’t ever make orbit. I’ve had
astronomers having nervous breakdowns trying to explain why, but the all agree
on the key point: rockets won’t do it for us here. Something wrong with the
gravity, they say it even crushes falling starlight.” The chairman taps a fat
finger on the photograph. “But you can do it using this. We invented it and the
bloody Americans didn’t. It’s called an ekranoplan, and you rocket boys are
going to stop being grounded cosmonauts and learn how to fly it. What do you
think, colonel Gagarin?”

The colonel whistles tunelessly through his teeth: he’s
finally worked out the scale. It looks like a flying boat with clipped wings,
jet engines clustered by the sides of its cockpit–but no flying boat ever
carried a runway with a brace of MiG-21s on its back. “It’s bigger than a
cruiser! Is it nuclear powered?”

“Of course.” The chairman’s grin slips. “It cost as much
as those moon rockets of Sergei’s,
colonel-general.
Try not to drop it.”

Gagarin glances up, surprise and awe visible on his
face. “Sir, I’m honored, but–”

“Don’t be.” The chairman cuts him off. “The promotion
was coming your way anyway. The posting that comes with it will earn you as
much honor as that first orbit. A second chance at space, if you like. But you
can’t fail: the cost is unthinkable. It’s not your skin that will pay the toll,
it’s our entire rationalist civilization.” Kosygin leans forward intently.

“Somewhere out there are beings so advanced that they
skinned the earth like a grape and plated it onto this disk–or worse,
copied us all right down to the atomic level and duplicated us like one of
those American Xerox machines. It’s not just us, though. You are aware of the
other continents in the oceans. We think some of them may be inhabited,
too–nothing else makes sense. Your task is to take the Sergei Korolev,
the first ship of its class, on an historic five-year cruise. You will boldly
go where no Soviet man has gone before, explore new worlds and look for new
peoples, and to establish fraternal socialist relations with them. But your primary
objective is to discover who built this giant mousetrap of a world, and why
they brought us to it, and to report back to us–before the Americans find
out.

Chapter Four:
Committee
Process

The cherry trees are in bloom in Washington DC, and
Gregor perspires in the summer heat. He has grown used to the relative cool of
London and this unaccustomed change of climate has disoriented him. Jet lag is
a thing of the past–a small mercy–but there are still adjustments
to make. Because the disk is flat, the daylight source–polar flares from
an accretion disk inside the axial hole, the scientists call it, which
signifies nothing to most people–grows and shrinks the same wherever you
stand.

There’s a concrete sixties-vintage office block with a
conference suite furnished in burnt umber and orange, chromed chairs and
Kandinsky prints on the walls: all very seventies. Gregor waits outside the
suite until the buzzer sounds and the receptionist looks up from behind her IBM
typewriter and says, “You can go in now, they’re expecting you.”

Gregor goes in. It’s an occupational hazard, but by no
means the worst, in his line of work.

“Have a seat.” It’s Seth Brundle, Gregor’s divisional
head–a grey-looking functionary, more adept at office back-stabbing than
field-expedient assassinations. His cover, like Gregor’s, is an
innocuous-sounding post in the Office of Technology Assessment. In fact, both
he and Gregor work for a different government agency, although the notional
task is the same: identify technological threats and stamp on them before they
emerge.

Brundle is not alone in the room. He proceeds with the
introductions: “Greg Samsa is our London station chief and specialist in
scientific intelligence. Greg, this is Marcus.” The bald, thin-faced German in
the smart suit bobs his head and smiles behind his horn-rimmed glasses.
“Civilian consultant.” Gregor mistrusts him on sight. Marcus is a
defector–a former Stasi spook, from back before the Brezhnev purges of
the mid-sixties. Which puts an interesting complexion on this meeting.