by Dan Simmons
In the next few hours, Roth will be introduced to more than a hundred people and he makes the typical American mistake of trying to remember first names rather than the first name plus patronymic that would have made some sense out of the avalanche of names and faces. Still, Roth sorts some of the people out—there is the cosmonaut Sergei and his wife Yelena; Tamara, the attractive Moscow psychic who had predicted the near-catastrophic problems on Vasily Tsibliyev’s Mir mission (being specific to foretelling the day of the collision between Mir and its supply rocket, according to Vasilisa); Viktor, the chain-smoking deputy flight director with white hair; flight engineer Pavel (“Pasha,”) cosmonaut Aleksandr (“Sasha”) and his wife Ludmilla and daughters Natasha and Yevgena; flight director Vladimir; TsUP psychologist Rotislav whom Vasilisa and others call “Steve”; the cosmonaut team of Yuri and Yuri; cosmonaut Vasily (“Vasya”) and his wife Larissa; and so on and so forth.
In addition to the cosmonauts and their families and the TsUP flight controllers and directors, there are famous faces at the party—important Russian politicians, an American congressman whom Roth knows to be a complete asshole, several NASA people, two astronauts and a former astronaut (none with their wives but one with a Russian girlfriend), some Russian poets and writers (all of whom are blind drunk by the time Roth is introduced to them), a second psychic—not nearly as attractive as Tamara, the first psychic Roth had met—an American film director lobbying for a flight to the ISS, a Russian film producer who glowers a lot, a German film director who seems to know everyone at the party, a Russian actress who is staggeringly beautiful and amazingly stupid, and a dog with the most sympathetic eyes Roth has ever seen on a living creature.
A large plasma TV screen has been set up in the living room and images come in through the evening of preparations in Red Square for the New Year’s celebration as well as CNN updates on revelry in China’s Tiananmen Square and elsewhere.
Occasionally touching his aching chest—when Vasilisa is elsewhere or not looking—Roth wanders through the house and evening, carrying the same unconsummated glass of vodka, shaking hands, chatting with those people who speak English, listening to Vasilisa’s whispered translation of songs and conversations.
The night grows darker and the party louder as the clocks crawl toward midnight.
THREE cosmonauts are on the glassed-in porch, arguing earnestly in Russian about the experience of launch and entering low-earth-orbit. Roth remembers Vasilisa’s whispered capsule history of each of the men:
Anatoli Arstebarski had flown in space only once, a successful flight, before pursuing a more lucrative profession; Sergei Krikalev was perhaps the most successful cosmonaut now working, having flown on Mir, the International Space Station, and on the shuttle; Viktor Afanasiev, their host this evening and the last Mir commander, is the man with the occasional bad dreams, the man whom Roth thinks of as the captain of the space Titanic. Roth holds his glass of vodka and listens to the deep male voices punctuated by Vasilisa’s soft whisper as she rushes to interpret.
Anatoli: “It is like birth. There is the long wait, the claustrophobia, the darkness, the distantly heard noises—the gurgle of glycol pumps, the hum and tick of power units, the whisper of half-heard voices from the world without—and then the trauma, the pain of g-forces, the terrible vibration and sudden noise, followed by the entry into light and the cosmos.”
Sergei: “Nonsense. It is like sex. There is the long anticipation—sometimes so much more exciting than the real event. The foreplay—the endless, frustrating simulations. Then the preparation on the pad. The lying down on the form-fitting couches. The tease of the countdown. The pulse accelerating, the senses finely tuned. Then the explosion of release. An ejaculation of energy…thrust, thrust my friends. It is all about thrust. After the release and the straining and the cries aloud—oh, God… Go! Go!…there is the silence and the cool embrace of space. And then, as soon as it is finished, one wants it to start all over again.”
Viktor: “What total bullshit. Launch is like dying. Ignition is the casting free from the body, the separation of spirit from matter. We claw toward the fringes of atmosphere like a drowning man fighting his way to the surface of the sea, like a soul flying free from its burden of flesh. But once to this surface, we find only vacuum. Everything and everyone we know and have known or ever could know is left behind. All of life is abandoned for the cold, silent sterility of the cosmos beyond. When the engines shut down, the ordeal and pain over, the barrier between life and death has been breached, the spirit is become one with the cosmos, but lonely…oh, so lonely.”
The three cosmonauts are silent for a minute and then start laughing together. Viktor pours more vodka for everyone.
ROTH, standing alone in the suddenly vacated enclosed porch, sees an old man crossing the dacha’s snowy lawn in the moonlight. Seen through the rim of frost on the glass panes, the old man is more apparition than reality—white clothes, white hair, white stubble, and white face glowing—arms raised like some iconic Christ. The figure shuffles through the snow, palms and face raised toward the night sky.
Roth sets his drink down on a table, ready to go out and fetch the old man—or at least see if the vision is real—when Viktor Afanasiev, Sergei Krikalev, and Vasilisa come out to the porch.
“Ah, it is Old Dmitry Dmitriovitch, Viktor’s neighbor,” says Sergei, whose English is excellent. The cosmonaut has trained in Houston, flown on the shuttle, and spent months on the ISS. “He lives in the caretaker’s house at the neighboring dacha and wanders over here regularly. It is not a problem in the summer, but Viktor worries that the old man will freeze to death on such nights as this.”
“What is he saying to the sky?” asks Vasilisa. “Is he senile?”
“Perhaps,” says Viktor, pulling on a goosedown jacket and fur hat that he keeps on a peg near the back door. “He cries to the sky because his son is a cosmonaut who has not returned from space.”
Roth looks surprised. “Someone who is up there now? Or someone who died?”
Viktor grins. “Old Dmitry’s son is a businessman in Omsk. The old man dreams and walks in his dreams. Please excuse me.” He goes outside and through the haloed glass, Roth, Sergei, and Vasilisa watch as Viktor leads the old man back across the lawn and out of sight through the bare trees.
A cassette recorder is playing loud martial music and thirty or forty Russians in the overheated main room are singing the words to the song. Vasilisa crosses the room to stand next to Roth. “It is the unofficial cosmonaut anthem,” she whispers and then interprets softly as the Russians sing.
The Earth can be seen through the window
Like the son misses his mother
We miss the Earth, there is only one
However, the stars
Get closer, but they are still cold
And like in dark times
The mother waits for her son, the Earth waits for its sons.
We do not dream about the roar of the cosmodrome
Nor about this icy blue
We dream about grass, grass near the house
Green, green grass.
The Russians applaud themselves when the song is done.
AN hour before midnight, Roth meets an American millionaire—Tom Esterhazy—who is scheduled to be the next paying “tourist” that the Russians will send to the international station. Esterhazy, who is drinking only bottled water, explains that he was a research mathematician at Los Alamos and at the Santa Fe Complexity Institute before he made his millions by applying new theorems in chaos mathematics to the stock market.
“The market is just another complex system constantly teetering on the edge of chaos,” says Esterhazy, speaking softly but close to Roth’s ear to be heard over the rising noise of the crowd. “Like the moon Hyperion. Like the ripple dynamics of a flag in the wind or the rising curl of cigarette smoke.” The younger man gestures toward the cloud of smoke that hangs in the room like a smog bank.
“Only you can’t mak
e hundreds of millions of dollars analyzing flag ripples or cigarette smoke,” says Roth, who has heard of the man.
Esterhazy shrugs. “If you’re smart enough you could.”
Roth decides to play reporter. “So how much are you paying Energia and the Russian Space Agency to get this ride?”
The young millionaire shrugs again. “About what Denis Tito paid, I guess. It doesn’t matter.”
It must be nice, thinks Roth, to be able to think that twenty million dollars doesn’t matter. He says instead, “What are you going to do during your four days up there?”
“Look at clouds.”
Roth starts to laugh—his New York Times editor had made some joke about this guy looking at cloud tops—but stops when he realizes that the millionaire is serious. “You’re paying all that money just to look at clouds?”
Esterhazy nods, still serious, and leans closer to talk. “My expertise is in fractal analyses of the edges of destabilizing complex systems. Clouds are the ultimate example of that. When I was a researcher in New Mexico, I used to set up trips to conferences just so I could look down on clouds from the planes. I never went to the conferences themselves, I just wanted the plane ride. When the Los Alamos lab found out, they turned down my conference requests. Later, when I made the money on Wall Street, I bought a Learjet just so we could fly above the clouds.”
Roth nods, thinking, This man is certifiable. No wonder the Russians are contemptuous of us. He says, “Will it be that much better to look down at clouds from the space station rather than from a jet?”
Esterhazy looks at him as if it is Roth who is crazy. “Of course. I’ll be able to look at cloud patterns covering tens of thousands of square miles. I’ll be able to see cirrus and stratocirrus across huge swaths of the South Pacific, watch cumulus build twenty kilometers high across the Urals. Of course it will be better. It’ll be unique.”
Roth nods dubiously.
Esterhazy takes his arm in a tight grip. “I’m serious. Imagine being a mathematician trying to understand the universe through the study of waves—regular waves, ocean waves—but your only chance of seeing the waves was from five hundred feet under water. Nuts, right? But that’s what fractal complexity studies of cloud patterns is like from inside the atmosphere, from the surface. We live at the bottom of a well.”
“But you have weather satellites…” begins Roth.
Esterhazy shakes his head. “No, no, no. All mathematics, much less complexity/chaos math, is about seventy percent intuitive. It wasn’t some sort of plodding, successive approximation that allowed me to understand the wavefront dynamic of the stock market. I was there on the floor with a broker friend one day, just gawking, looking at the computer displays and the big board and the numbers crawling and the scribbles of the guys in the pit, when I got the fractal repetition function I needed. Now to understand the fractal dynamics of clouds that way, to be able to predict the chaos at their fringes, I have to see the clouds. All of them. Get a gestalt view. Feel the dynamic of it all. Just look. Four days won’t be enough, but it’ll be a start.”
“You have to become God for a while,” says Roth.
“Yeah,” says Esterhazy. “That won’t be enough, but it’ll be a start.”
IT is a few minutes before midnight when Roth goes alone to the cold sunroom porch to fetch his glass of vodka and sees the old man wandering on the snowy lawn again.
Roth goes to the door to call Vasilisa or his host, but hesitates; the guests are gathered around Viktor in the crowded main room, singing together in the last minutes before the New Year, and Vasilisa is nowhere in sight.
Roth goes to the double door—it works like a glass airlock against the lunar cold outside—pulls on the fur hat Viktor has left hanging there, and walks out into the frigid night air.
Moonlight sparkles blue on the broad hillside that leads down to a frozen lake. The clouds and snow flurries are gone, leaving a sky so moonfilled and star-broken that Roth looks up for a long minute before searching for Old Dmitry again.
There he is, twenty meters downhill from the house, a white figure near the edge of the birch forest. The snow fractures and cracks under Roth’s city shoes.
He opens his mouth to shout the old man’s name but the air is so cold that it cuts into his chest like vacuum rushing in. Roth gasps and holds his chest. He concentrates on breathing as he crosses the last blue-glowed space to where the old man stands, back turned toward Roth, staring up through the birch branches at the night sky. Old Dmitry had been wearing baggy pants and a sweater earlier in the evening, but now he wears long white robes that remind Roth of a shroud.
Roth pauses an arm’s length from the old man and looks skyward himself. Something—a satellite perhaps or a high-flying military plane or perhaps the space station itself, Roth does not know if one can see it from Moscow—cuts across the starfield like a thrown diamond.
Roth looks down again just as the old man turns toward him.
It is Roth’s father.
Roth lifts a hand to his own chest. As if in response, his father lifts a hand—at first Roth is sure that his father is going to touch him, touch his face, touch his son’s aching heart—but the arm and hand continue rising until the long finger is pointing at something in the sky behind and above the writer.
Roth starts to turn to look when the great roar and brightness fills the air around him, surrounding him and entering him like fire. He clenches his eyes tightly shut and clasps his hands over his ears, but the flare of light and roar of noise break through and overwhelm him.
Flames. The flames of hypergolic fuels mixing, of solid-fuel boosters lighting off, of the shuttle’s main engines firing and the Soyuz’s tripartate boosters exploding in energy.
Sound. The roar of millions upon millions of ergs and jules and footpounds of energy exploding into the night in a second, in a millionth of a second. A Saturn V roar, five engines bellowing flame at once. An Energia roar, Mars-rocket explosion roar, controlled N-1 moon rocket three-stage bellow-roar.
He has fallen but does not fall. Roth floats sideways in the air, a meter and a half above the ground. His father holds him, cradling him.
“Relax,” says his father, holding him under the shoulders and legs. “Just float. Let the ocean do the work. I’m going to let go.”
His father releases him gently.
The roar and flame and vibration surround him again. Roth clutches his left arm with his right hand, feeling the roar as constriction, the flame as pain, but then he obeys his father’s command and relaxes, opening his arms wide, lying back, feeling gravity relent.
Roth lets the engine roar carry him skyward, seeing Baikonur fall far below like a snowy chessboard, watching Florida fall below like a trailing finger and seeing the green of the coastal waters give way to the ultramarine blue depths of the deeper sea.
He rises with the roar and on the roar, flashing through high wisps of clouds, feeling the pressure of air and gravity lessen as the sky darkens to black and the stars burn without twinkling.
“Norman. Norman!”
He hears the voice through the roar and knows it is Vasilisa, distantly feels her knee under his head and her hands ripping open his collar buttons but then the voice is gone, lost in the roar and the glow.
The solid rocket boosters fall away.
The first stage separates, falls away, a black and white metal ring rich in solid sunlight, tumbling back toward the blue and scattered white curve of Earth below.
The limb of his world becomes curved, a scimitar of blue and yellow beneath the black cosmos. Roth hears distant voices like whispered commands or entreaties through poorly tuned earphones and knows that he must keep his eyes closed if he is to see all this, but just as he is about to open his eyes anyway, the second stage fires, the flame returns and he is pressed back by g-forces again as he continues to climb into the blackness.
“Bring my bag from the car. Hurry!”
Roth hears this in Russian but understands it perfe
ctly. How strange it was when languages were like walls, separating understanding. Now that he is this high, he can look over any wall.
The noise and flame and compression end as suddenly as they began.
Roth is floating now, arms out, legs extended. He twists his upper body and rotates freely in space, looking down at where he has been. Where he has always been.
He flies toward sunrise. The white clouds move in procession far below him like a sheep moving across a blue meadow. A peninsula of land extends toward the sunrise like a god’s finger parting the green sea. On the night side of the terminator, stratocumulus twenty kilometers high pulse with their own internal lightning.
“Stand back…the needle…into the heart.”
Roth fumbles away the invisible earphones, tired of the insect buzz of the distant voices. Let TsUP and Houston give their commands. He does not have to listen. Silence rushes around him like water flooding into a compartment.
The sun fills the curve of the world, fires rays across the thin sheen of atmosphere like a stiletto fissure of gold flame, and breaks free of Earth, rising into black space like the broiling thermonuclear explosion it is. Space, he discovers, is not silent. Stars hiss and crackle; Roth has heard this before through recordings from radio telescopes, but they also sing—a chorus of perfect voices singing in a language not unlike Latin. Roth strains to hear what they are saying, this lovely chorus of unearthly voices, but the meaning slides away just beyond the cusp of his understanding. But now Roth rises into the rush and roar of the surf of the blazing sun itself, feels individual photons as they strike his bare skin and sees the curl and wave-crash of the solar wind as it dashes against the pulsing, breathing folds of the Earth’s magnetosphere. Space, he realizes, is not empty at all; it is filled with tidal waves of gravity, great shock waves of light, the braided, living and constantly moving lines of magnetic force, all set against the visible and audible chorus of the stars.
