Nine Layers of Sky

by Liz Williams

  The passengers rearranged themselves in a storm of questions, but the driver just shrugged.

  “Some incident with the Americans. Don’t ask me. I don’t know anything.”

  Ilya, leaning across Elena, was trying to look out of the window, but after a moment he shook his head. “Can’t see a thing. It all looks quiet enough.” He squeezed her hand. “Are you all right?”

  “I think so,” Elena told him, but she was lying. She was certain that the incident had been related to them, that they were the eye of a traveling storm. She did not understand how she knew this, but she was sure of it. She thought again of Manas, falling under the bite of the sword.

  Soon after that they reached Naryn: a dismal collection of army barracks and featureless breeze-block housing. The river thundered alongside the road, grey with mud washed down from the mountain slopes. Ilya and Elena left the bus and walked across the weed-strewn central square opposite the administrative Akimyat building. The streets were filled with soldiers: Russian, Kyrgyz, and a detachment of men in foreign uniforms, all wearing sunglasses.

  “Americans,” Ilya said, and his mouth turned down.

  “You said you were in Afghanistan,” she prompted, diffidently.

  “Once in the 1830’s, trying to do something about British spies.” He gave a brief, reminiscent smile. “Very enterprising young men. Very fond of disguises. But I was there again in the seventies, with the Soviet Army.”

  “That must have been grim.”

  His face was bleak. He caught hold of his wrist. “First introduction.”

  “To heroin?”

  “They grew so much of it. There were fields of poppies in the mountains above Herat. The flowers were beautiful, like suns in the grass. But the army ran out of medicine, and I was injured—got shot by a sniper—so … That’s really where it started. I kicked it when I came back to Russia, but it was always there in the back of my mind, and things got bad after Afghanistan. I think we brought a dark wind blowing in our direction. The Soviet Union started to break down, and then it collapsed and so did I. That’s when I started using again.”

  She looked at him. His chin was tucked into his collar, against the wind. His pale eyes were narrowed. He seemed suddenly quintessentially Slavic: closed, stubborn, not quite broken. She tucked her arm in his and walked on.

  The only place they could find to stay was a former Pioneer Hostel with dormitory beds. At this time of year, they had the dorm to themselves, but it was drafty and echoing, with too many shadowy corners for comfort. Neither of them felt inclined to stay in it for longer than they had to. They went out to buy shashlik, which was marinated and tough. Even sheep must find it a hard life on those high, stony pastures, Elena thought. When they finished eating, it was still only eight o’clock. In tacit collusion, they went in search of a bar.

  Naryn, all too clearly, was not known for its nightlife. There was a bar not far from the Pioneer Hostel, filled with soldiers and local prostitutes. Elena attracted stares from both sexes: hostile wariness from the women, frank interest from the men. Ilya’s mouth tightened. They found a rickety table in the back and ordered a bottle of vodka. Kyrgyz pop blared from the speakers. It was too noisy to have a conversation. They held hands on the beer-stained tabletop and drank in silence. A group of Americans came in to sit behind Elena. She listened, idly, but they spoke fast and her English was rusty. A single snatch of conversation managed to catch her attention.

  “Man, when that guy in your truck started shooting, I thought you were going to go nuts.”

  “I thought I was going nuts. One minute he was asking for a light, the next, he was firing into the fucking air. I couldn’t see a goddamn thing—and then there it was, real quick.”

  “What did it look like?”

  “Like a shadow—a little, dark thing. Probably an animal. Marmoset or something. Only saw it for a second, then it just disappeared.”

  “What are they talking about?” Ilya murmured.

  “I don’t know. I think they’re talking about the shooting on the road. One of the men thinks there was something strange about it.” She thought of the thing they had seen on the slopes of Koktubye; the thing that Ilya had called a ghoul.

  Ilya knocked back a shot of vodka in evident disgust. “That’s the way it’s been all along. Something strange. Shadows in the darkness, old ghosts. I want to deal with something real. Let’s go back to the hostel and get some sleep.”

  His mood seemed to have changed for the worse. He was silent on the way back.

  At last she ventured to ask. “Ilya? What’s wrong?”

  “It’s nothing.”

  She did not press the question, but he must have taken her silence as a reproach, for he said, “Those Americans. You had your back to them, but I could see how they were looking at you.”

  “They didn’t mean any harm, Ilya. They’d have looked at anything female.”

  “But I kept thinking: What’s she doing with me?”

  Mythical forces were one thing, old-fashioned male jealousy was another. It was almost good to have something normal to confront.

  She said, “I didn’t notice them. I was looking at you. I’m falling in love with you, Ilya.” She hadn’t meant to say that, either. It seemed to echo around the main square. He kissed her, on the windblown steps of the Akimyat, and for once she did not care who or what might be watching.

  Three

  KYRGYZSTAN, 21ST CENTURY

  They had an uneasy wait at the bus station the next morning. If there were not enough passengers, the driver told them, the bus would not run. The wind was still whipping down from the slopes, freezing the skin. Ilya pulled the collar of his coat closer and turned to Elena.

  “I don’t want to hire a car,” he said in an undertone. “I don’t trust these people.”

  There were no Russian faces in sight, only Kyrgyz and Tungan, and Ilya caught no more than fragmented snatches of conversation. He did not hold anything against the locals, but this was not his country. They were less than a day’s drive from the Chinese border.

  “If the bus goes, we could be in Uzbekistan by tomorrow,” Elena said.

  “Do you know how long it will take?”

  “Andjian’s only two hundred kilometers from here, but it depends on the weather. I spoke to the driver. He says the Naryn road is reasonable, but then it heads up into the passes on the border and it can take ages. He told me to buy food.” She held up a parcel.

  “Thank you. I’ll give you the money.”

  She shook her head. “We’ll sort something out.” She chafed her hands. “It’s still so cold. I won’t deny it, Ilya, I’ll be happy when we get farther south.”

  Ilya agreed with her, partly at the thought of sunlight and spring thaw, but partly just to keep the peace. I am a Northerner, he thought, and I like a colder light, a paler day. It was well enough in these high passes, but he disliked the prospect of Uzbekistan; its subtleties, its proximity to the countries that had once formed the Persian empire. He admired its people, even though they had matched the Russians, cruelty for cruelty, over the years, but the region had brought him nothing but unhappiness. Tamerlane still cast a long shadow over anyone Russian.

  Elena nudged him. “Ilya? Come on. The bus is going.” A family had appeared, enough people to make the journey worthwhile. Ilya watched them as they boarded the bus before him. They were Uzbeks, going home. A man in a shabby suit, two women in patterned floral frocks and slippers, a slender girl of ten who gazed at Ilya with a somber hostility that dismayed him. He wondered if she looked at all Russians in that way. The women, chattering like birds, herded the child onto the bus and vanished into its depths.

  Ilya and Elena took a seat near the front, away from the petrol fumes. For once there was plenty of room, but there was little to see: only the mud-colored road ahead of them, with occasional glimpses of the rushing Naryn River. The road followed it, snaking around the hills. The monotony was broken only by small settlements, a herd of g
oats roaming along the road, an occasional herdsman on horseback.

  To alleviate the boredom, Ilya began to question Elena about her time on the space program. It seemed as magical a dream as any he had ever come across. He listened to her stories about Mir with as much wonder as a child listening to fairy tales.

  “And then, of course, they had the fire—one of the guys, Lazutkhin, lit an oxygen candle and instead of just releasing the stuff, it went up like a little volcano. The trouble they had putting it out—he said he thought they were all done for. And then there was the crash. One of the docking modules came in too fast and the commander couldn’t bring it in properly.”

  “It hit the station?” He remembered reading something of the sort in the newspaper, but it was still so hard to know what was true and what wasn’t.

  “It nudged it, which was enough to do damage, of course. It was an awful day. Everyone going around with long faces …”

  “They must have been afraid for the cosmonauts.”

  “Yes, naturally—but they also thought the Americans would pull out, you see. Because NASA was always so worried about safety—as though you could put men into space without risk.”

  “The Americans never want to make sacrifices,” Ilya said.

  “No, they don’t. Although sometimes I think they might have a point. Americans—Westerners—value life in a way that we don’t anymore. I sometimes think we’ve stopped caring, become too hard. Ilya, I wouldn’t say this if we weren’t in a half-empty bus in the middle of nowhere, but I got the impression that Star City would rather have someone die than be found out. They were running a whole set of experiments up there that the Americans didn’t know about, and it wasn’t really safe at all. Ground control took some crazy risks with those cosmonauts. When the crash happened, NASA wanted to know why they brought the docking modules in so quickly, why they didn’t steer them in slowly so that they could control the speed. But Yuri told me that if you brought the thing in too slowly, the docking mechanism malfunctioned—it made all sorts of compensations that would put the module even farther off course. Whereas if they brought the modules in quickly, they didn’t have time for it to go wrong.” She paused and took a drag on her cigarette. “It’s amazing no one died.”

  As casually as he could, Ilya asked, “Who’s Yuri?”

  “One of the cosmonauts.” She stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray on the side of the seat. “Actually, I went out with him for a bit. He was my last boyfriend. It wasn’t serious.” But her glance flickered and he knew that this was another of her white lies, the kind women told so easily to men. He could not blame her. “He broke it off. He was going back to Moscow. I think he had someone else there. They usually do.”

  “He was a fool,” Ilya said, and was rewarded with her smile. But he could not stop himself from asking, “And others?”

  “Other men, you mean? I was married for a short time. He was an engineering student. We were nineteen—much too young, but everyone did it then. They’d say you were left on the shelf if you weren’t engaged by twenty-two.”

  “It was much the same in my day,” Ilya told her. Whenever that had been.

  “It’s different now. The divorce rate’s so high, they’re waiting longer. Some girls don’t get married at all; imagine that.”

  Ilya did not want to get drawn into a conversation about social customs, though he knew that he should let the matter drop. How old did you have to be before you started taking note of all these lessons?

  “Why did your marriage end?”

  “I left him. He drank, of course, everyone does, but it was getting ridiculous. What can you do? And he wanted to end it, anyway.” She was staring out through the grimy windscreen of the bus. “We couldn’t have kids. I mean—I couldn’t. Something wrong with me … But it’s the same with so many girls round here, and anyway, you can’t be sure how they’ll turn out. When I was little, the Chinese were still doing atmospheric testing at Lop Nur—you heard about that? And we were doing nuclear tests as well, so … It’s bad in the north of the country. Children born without eyes, without proper bones. It’s probably just as well.” She sounded matter-of-fact. He could not tell from her voice whether she really believed it, or whether it was simply too old a pain. He squeezed her hand. After a moment, she said, “And you?”

  “What about me?”

  “With women.”

  “Well, I got married in sixteen hundred and thirty-two and she was killed eight years later, by the Tartars. I have no children that I know of.” And that had been a perpetual surprise, given the number of women he had slept with. The refrain echoed in his head: not human.

  Elena looked perfectly blank. She said, “I’ll say this for you, Ilya, it’s not like any relationship I’ve ever been in before. Just tell me: there’s no babushka somewhere, wizened like an apple, who’s still cherishing fond memories?”

  “God, I hope not. I’ve always tried not to get too involved. Except once.”

  “What did she look like? Your wife?”

  “I barely remember,” Ilya said, and was disconcerted to realize that it was true. She had died in the days before photographs, and memory grew as faint and distant as a faded icon if there was nothing to refresh it. He was about to say, “I think she looked like you,” but instinct told him that this would not be well-received. He took Elena’s face between his hands and kissed her instead, long and slow. The driver gave a reproving cough. The bus trundled on.

  Four

  KYRGYZSTAN, 21ST CENTURY

  She dreamed that she was back at Baikonur, sitting tensely with the rest of ground control as the Kvant module neared the station.

  Something was nagging at her. Surely Mir had long since fallen from orbit? But she could see it on the screen, a spinning web above the world, and now the module that was drawing closer to it was no longer the familiar squat shape of Kvant, but the gleaming structure of the new international station. Elena found that she was gripping the side of the control module so tightly that her hands hurt.

  “Ladna, Elena. Ready?”

  “What?”

  “We’re all waiting, Elena.” Yuri Golynski was beaming at her. “Bring her in.”

  “But I’ve never done this before. I’m in astrophysics.”

  “Not anymore.” They were all looking at her expectantly. “It’s all up to you now.”

  She looked down at the instrument panel and it had changed to a garden. Blue-fronded ferns had replaced the levers, cushions of moss sprouted where the console buttons had been.

  “I don’t understand,” Elena said, but she began to move her hands in a sequence of dreamlike passes between the ferns, so that they drifted apart. Slowly, the new space station began to glide toward Mir, spinning as it went. Elena felt as though she was conducting an orchestra. She waved her arms, not having the faintest idea what she was doing.

  “Gently, Elena …” It was Ilya’s voice in her ear. She looked up at him, puzzled.

  “What are you doing here?”

  “I’ve made you some tea,” Ilya said. He took her hand and guided it across the console.

  “No,” she said. “I can do it on my own.”

  The two structures nudged one another and merged. Elena watched in fascination as the solar arrays slid across one another, meshing the two stations into a seamless whole.

  “Well done,” someone was saying. “A perfect match.” And Elena woke up.

  Five

  KYRGYZSTAN, 21ST CENTURY

  It was dark when they reached the border: a huddle of huts alongside a checkpoint on the Andjian road. The bus stopped and an official climbed aboard to check papers. Elena handed over her scanty identity documents; Ilya delivered his greasy bundle of assorted forgeries. He made sure that the official got a good look at the folded packet of dollars.

  “Don’t you have proper papers?” the official asked.

  “Aren’t those good enough?” Ilya said.

  “We have to cross,” Elena added. She pl
ucked at the official’s sleeve. “My mother’s ill—we only found out last night.” The official looked down at her, expressionless, and spoke the words that Ilya had been dreading.

  “Come with me, please.”

  “Look, can’t we sort this out?” Ilya moved the packet of dollars from one hand to the other.

  “Just come with me.”

  There was nothing for it but to comply. As they stepped down from the bus, the driver leaned across. “I’m sorry. I can’t wait, you understand? I don’t know how long they’re going to keep you.”

  “When’s the next bus due, then?” Elena asked.

  “There’ll be another one along in the morning, the eight-fifteen.”

  “But we can’t stay here all night.”

  “I’m sorry,” the driver said. Ilya heard the words as clearly as if the man had spoken them aloud: It’s not my problem.

  “All right,” he said. “Elena, come on. We’ve no choice.”

  They were taken into a small cubicle, partitioned off from one of the huts.

  “I have to make a phone call,” the official said.

  “Can’t you just let us through? You might be making a mistake, you know. You wouldn’t want to do that.” Ilya spoke mildly, but he took care to catch the official’s eye as he did so. With chilly satisfaction, he saw the man’s face grow pale.

  “We have to check. We’ve had people coming over the Afghan border, running drugs and arms.”

  “But you can see we’re Russians,” Elena pleaded. Ilya watched the official’s face begin to close down with a familiar bland, blank denial. He knew that they would get no further with this line of talk, and he did not have to look at Elena to see that she understood it, too. It was how things were.

  “All right, all right,” Ilya said. “Make your phone call.”

  The official left the room, shutting the door behind him. Ilya listened.

  “Who is he calling? Can you hear?”

  The official was describing them. “A man and a woman. The man’s tall, got a thin sort of face, doesn’t look too good to me. The woman’s a blonde—no, not dyed. Blue eyes, about thirty-five. Pretty enough. Wearing a fur coat. Yes, they’re Russians. No, no one’s searched them yet. Do you want me to do it? What?”