‘This is a hijacking, don’t anyone move!’ the old woman screamed.
In moments, it was all over. I saw the German official – von Ribbentrop – look at us coolly. But he stayed in his seat, and said nothing.
‘Come on!’ Anna said to me. She was radiant then. Her hand tugged at mine and I followed her down the train.
‘Where are we going?’
All around us, bewildered passengers were sitting, guarded by armed revolutionaries. ‘Here,’ Anna said, flinging open the door of a private compartment in first class. It was empty. We went inside and she pulled up the window. Cold air streamed in.
‘Where are we going?’ I said, and she grinned.
‘Look!’
I sat facing the direction of travel. She sat beside me. We held hands. I put my head out of the window and the wind buffeted my face. Fields, flat lands, distant villages…
Ahead of us, the air shimmered.
A thing like a concave mirror made of air and sunlight formed in front of the train. It was a few hundred feet ahead of us and coming up fast. It engulfed the train tracks, and the engine, heading towards it, would hit it head on, I realised. We were going into it. I couldn’t see what was beyond. ‘Anna!’ I said. She squeezed my hand and said nothing. I watched it approach. We were mirrored in it. Then the engine hit it – and disappeared through. I gave an involuntary cry and heard Anna laugh beside me. I heard other passengers shouting elsewhere on the train, but their voices were weak and fractured, like bubbles rising underwater. I watched the train being swallowed by the mirror, and then, with a cry, we too were submerged into it.
The world changed.
One moment we were travelling along tracks laid down in French soil, nothing but the countryside around us. The next, a blast of warm air hit my face and I could smell a strong, sweet, almost cloying smell of flowers, a humidity of vegetation, and hear the hum of insects. The landscape changed. The world changed. All around us were thick, alien forests. I saw flowers larger than a man, trees rising impossibly high into the air, twisting and turning in a tangled mass of black branches like octopus arms. A bird the size of a bicycle perched on a branch above the passing train, holding a worm-like thing the size of a human leg. The train continued to run on. I watched the train tracks ahead, cutting through the forest, and then we were out of the trees and a hot sun beat down on my face. I raised my head and saw a massive red sun in the sky. Its light near-blinded me. I quickly ducked my head back into the compartment’s relative cool, blinking back tears. The air tasted different. The light was different. And my weight, I suddenly realised, felt different, too, heavier, and it was harder to breathe. ‘You’ll get used to it,’ Anna said, kissing me. When my eyes stopped hurting at last, I looked out of the window again. The forest had disappeared and in its place there was the city.
12.
I had never thought to see such a city. It rose into the air, towers and ziggurats like needles pointing at the sky. Webs of brightly spun metal connected them, high in the air. The city spread out for untold miles, made of dark stone and light metal, with sheer walls rising around it like a protective shield. ‘Leningrad…’ Anna said. Dark shapes moved in the sky, and one swooped low over the train, calling out in a strange and haunting voice. As it swooped near us, it blocked out the sun and I realised that it was as large as the engine pulling the train. I heard gunshots from a nearby window and the reptilian creature turned, majestically, and swooped away unhurt on leather wings.
The train headed to the city. As we came near, its sheer scale became harder to fathom, the walls rose forbiddingly, and two enormous gates appeared, opening slowly to allow the train passage.
Inside, we arrived at some sort of terminal, an enormous stone building, as though built for creatures far larger than humans. Red flags waved everywhere in the hot wind, and, above the rising arch of the building, I saw the red star of Mir. This was it, I realised. This was the mysterious new world discovered by those early cadres in 1908, as they traversed the gate that had appeared – was created? – in Tunguska. And this was Leningrad, seat of the revolutionary forces, the base from which the insurgents fought for the communist cause back on Earth.
We were taken off the train. Soldiers dressed in khaki uniforms, moving sluggishly through the heavier gravity, escorted away von Ribbentrop and the German soldiers. The rest of us remained, under the heat of that alien sun, captors and captives both. A hush settled on us, slowly. The smell of the city was old, the smell of stone and weathered metal and plants. In the cracks between the walls, the same giant flowers I had seen before grew, and their scent, sickly and sweet, seemed to make my limbs heavy, my head dull. It was so quiet. Anna stood beside me, her eyes closed, her head tilted up to catch the sunlight. Her face seemed so peaceful then. I heard sound: booted feet on gravel. I turned and looked. A man, heavy-set, with thick black hair and a bushy moustache, stood on a stone platform above the tracks, facing us. ‘Friends!’ he said. He raised his hands as if to hold us. His voice carried. ‘Comrades!’
We all looked at him. His raised hands held us, bound, as if by magic. ‘I am Stalin,’ he said, simply.
‘Comrade Stalin…’ Anna breathed beside me, her eyes filled with awe.
‘Welcome to Mir!’ Stalin said. ‘Comrades, I will speak to you plainly. You have come a long way to be here, and you are far from home. Impossibly far. And yet so very near, too. It is a paradox.’ He laughed, and it made me shiver. ‘Our gates open on Earth, allow us to travel instantaneously! Here, on Mir, the socialist revolution has already happened. Ours is a workers’ utopia, a true commune. Not so there, on Earth. Comrades, I tell you true: a war is coming. A great war, a world war, a class war. A war that we shall win. And so I ask you: will you join the revolution?’
My heart was beating fast; my hands were clammy. ‘Will you join us, with all your heart and of your own free will?’
‘What if we don’t?’ someone at the back shouted. Stalin smiled. His hands, spread out, held us in a steel trap. He made one simple gesture. Indicating the outside. Go, he seemed to say. The gates are open.
We were silent. Exchanging glances. The only true choice is no choice at all.
‘Will you join us?’ Stalin roared, and before I knew it my good hand was raised in the air, holding Anna’s still, and I cried, ‘Yes!’ and all around me the others were doing the same, caught up in the fervour or acceding to the inevitable, or both.
‘Will you join us?’ Stalin roared.
‘Yes!’ we shouted, as one.
‘Revolution!’ Stalin cried. And we replied, in an echoing, growing wave of sound, threatening to spill and to rise and to drown, there on that alien world, under its alien sun: ‘Revolution! Revolution! Revolution!’
13.
There is no true night on Mir. The three moons describe conflicting orbits in the sky, always casting their light. There are periods of gloom, but they are few. On one such, I was patrolling the outer perimeter of the city with Lansky, a Russian and fellow volunteer. Lansky was smoking. There were agricultural collectives beyond the city, and the tobacco, Mir-grown, was harsh and fragrant, and was said to give the user a mild sense of euphoria.
‘We won’t be staying here forever, you know,’ Lansky said. We carried guns, keeping an eye out for the native predators.
‘I know,’ I said. Moscow had fallen without a fight the previous winter. The Romanovs had escaped to Ekaterinburg, and there they were cornered, and executed. The Soviet Union was formally a reality. I never saw Stalin again after that first day on Mir. Shortly after that day, he departed back to Earth, to lead the revolution and prepare for the coming war.
I knew, by then, that von Ribbentrop, the German official on the train, had met with Molotov, to discuss – so the rumours went – a pact between us Soviets and the Nazi regime. I did not know what was agreed.
Human presence on Mir grew daily. More and more volunteers came through the gates, joining our utopia, working in the collective farms and bei
ng trained in combat. I had swapped my London clothes for khakis, my muscles strengthened in labour and the heavier gravity, and my skin was tanned from the burning sun of Mir. I was a new man. I felt that, by crossing the gate, I had been reborn. I was no longer Mathieu Heisikovitz, of Transylvania, a student of literature adrift in the world. I was now Comrade Mathieu, of the Glorious Army of the Revolution, and there was nothing I couldn’t do. Those had been the happiest years of my life.
Then, too, there was Anna, always Anna. We had healed on Mir, our wounds and our hearts, and in the summer of 1937 we were married in a simple ceremony, alongside ten other couples in our commune.
‘There!’ Lansky said. ‘What was that?’
In the gloom, it was hard to tell apart shapes or depths. ‘A zmag?’ I said, cocking my gun – it was our name for the great, dragon-like creatures that still lived in the wilds of Mir.
‘No,’ Lansky said. ‘No, I do not think s—’ and with that, and with hardly a sound, he fell.
I stared at him, for a moment nonplussed. He convulsed on the ground and then was still. There was blood seeping out from a hole in his forehead.
He’d been shot.
‘Attack!’ I cried, when I found my voice. ‘We’re under attack!’
I dropped to the ground and saw tracer fire flash over my head, narrowly missing me. I could see them ahead now, a group of men in dark clothes, moving through the wild forest that surrounded the city. Who were they? How had they come to be here? They moved awkwardly, as though not used to the heavier gravity of Mir, but they were coordinated, efficient.
‘Report your position!’ My radio came alive.
‘Sector five, sub-sector blue,’ I said.
‘On our way.’
I stayed on the ground. Then there was a burst of light coming from the trees, shooting high into the sky, where it exploded. The gloom turned to daylight, and I could see everything in sharp relief, see the men moving towards me, see their insignia, but not understanding, for some wore the Nazi swastika, while others bore the winged horse of the British Airborne, and others still had the distinctive stars-and-stripes of the United States.
They swarmed towards me, pointing their guns, surrounding me in a half-circle. ‘On your feet… Comrade,’ one of them said. Above our heads, the flame died, but I could hear the sound of a flyer approaching. ‘Take him,’ the man – their commander – said. They pulled me up roughly and bound my hands. I was dragged after them. Overhead, more fliers arrived. I heard something fall through the air with a whistle and hit the ground. An explosion tore up earth and trees, flinging them in all direction. ‘Retreat!’ They dragged me into the woods. Bombs were going off everywhere, but the soldiers seemed to melt into the trees, to disappear in the gloom. Suddenly we arrived at a clearing, and I saw a bubble of shimmering light, growing. A gate, I realised in horror.
‘No!’ I said. ‘Please! Let me go!’
They pulled me with them, into the light –
And we emerged in night-time, a moon overhead, a military base, the air cold, searchlights lighting up the sky. My teeth were chattering. ‘Welcome back to Earth,’ someone said, unkindly. Then they took me into the building and locked me up in a cell, and for a long time, no one came to see me.
14.
You all know about the war. I spent most of it in a series of prisoner-of-war camps, first in Königsberg, then near Munich, and the last in Dresden. I was locked up in a butchery cellar when the Allies bombed the city. When I stepped outside, the city had been wiped clear; nothing but rubble remained. I wandered its ruined streets like a ghost upon an alien world. And yet I was free!
The raid on Mir, I had soon found out, was only one of many as the Axis powers – that is Germany, Great Britain, and the United States – waded into the great war against our Soviet Union. The Molotov-Von Ribbentrop Accord had been a washout. Adolf Hitler’s ambition was to rule the whole of Europe, and the United States and Britain backed him as the only viable alternative to communism. From time to time, we would get news, in the POW camp, from the outside world. An Allied victory in Greece, a country which embraced communism; the Axis annexing Yugoslavia; China entering the war in the Pacific on the Allies’ side, Japan on the side of the capitalists, Hitler’s Afrika Korps sweeping across Egypt – it was hard to know how the war was going.
But the tide of war was turning. After Dresden, I was picked up by communist partisans operating in Germany. I was given a gun, and, once again, control of my own destiny. Together we roamed the countryside, blowing up bridges, attacking convoys, killing Axis soldiers. The Americans finally committed the bulk of their army to a D-Day attack in Normandy that, for a time, threatened to destroy the advances made by the Soviet forces. But we had a secret weapon…
There is a moment I do not dwell on. We had made camp, somewhere in the Ardennes. Built a fire. I sat with my back against a tree, weary beyond thought. At that time, communication with Mir was difficult; the Axis had gate-disruptor technology as well as their own, however crude, gateway devices. The war was carried out not only on Earth but on Mir, too. That night, however, a gate was opened, for just a moment, and a cadre came through from the other world. He spoke briefly with our commander, a burly Frenchman named Allard, before returning through the gate. Later, Allard came around with post for us. When he came to me, he stopped. ‘There is a letter for you,’ he said. I took it from his hands. It was a plain white envelope, stamped with the official red star. I did not want to open it, but at last I did.
It was printed on official letterhead. It was from the Department of War and it began, We regret to inform you.
‘I’m sorry,’ Allard said, awkwardly. I nodded, but said nothing. I folded the letter back and put it into the envelope and sat there, through the night, staring at it all the while but not seeing it. I was looking far away, to another world, and another time. And that is all I wish to say on that, now or ever.
15.
I never learned what it was in the vaults of the Bank of England that day so long ago, but I can guess. Let me tell you something about Mir, and about the city we called Leningrad. It was not a human city. Who built it? What comrades from beyond the stars may have fashioned that place, and what strange technology did they leave behind?
The gates, of course – but by the time the war ended, both sides had access to the technology. So it was not that.
On May eighth, 1945, a gate opened in the skies high above Munich. A solitary flyer emerged from it, a Mir flyer, of a type built and designed by Leningrad’s former, nameless occupiers. A silver cigar-shaped object, about ten feet in length, dropped from it and fell on the city. At exactly the same time, gates were opened over Birmingham, in England, and over Chicago in the United States.
You have seen the footage countless times. The bright, terribly bright flash of light. The way it engulfed the city and then, in the blink of an eye, constricted upon itself, became a pinprick of darkness, and faded out of existence, taking the entire city with it; buildings, people, bicycles and all. Nothing was left: nothing but earth.
Where did they go? Were they exterminated like so many ants? Or were they shipped, somehow, to some other place; another, desolate world? They are not on Mir. Not anywhere.
Two days after the fall of the Aetheric bombs, the war was officially over. Hitler committed suicide in his bunker. Churchill and President Truman met with Stalin at a place called Potsdam and negotiated a peace treaty.
The war was over.
Though we had not yet won.
16.
Life went on. I travelled to Mir for one last time, and thereafter never returned. In time, I remarried, and with my new bride travelled to Palestine, working and living on an agricultural commune, what we called a kibbutz. We had three children and they, in their turn, gave us grandchildren. The world remained divided: capitalism, led by the United States, on the one side, communism and the Great Soviet on the other. But we were slowly gaining. Capitalism carries inside it its own inhere
nt downfall.
One more memory, perhaps:
In 1991, I was watching television, live from Washington, D.C., where a coup had taken place. For three days, the world watched as George W. Bush was holed up in the Pentagon building and the rebels held the White House.
The coup failed. Yet it signalled the beginning of the end of the capitalist regime, the inevitable fall of the United States. In 1993 a young socialist senator, Hillary Rodham Clinton, was elected as president, ending nearly fifty years of a Cold War and bringing, for the first time, true peace to the entire planet.
I remember watching it, with my grandson in my lap, my grown daughter and her husband on the sofa, my wife in her armchair beside them.
17.
I am old now, but my memory still works. I sleep less and less. My wife passed away a year ago, but I am seldom lonely. My family visits me often, but more and more I find myself going back in time, to that fateful day in London, when I first saw my Anna… when the sky was ripped open and I saw the light of an alien sun. We called that other place Mir, which means both world, and peace, but it occurs to me that, for the first time, we can give that name to the planet we live on.
JOHN SCALZI
MUSE OF FIRE
The name of this book is Mash Up. The idea is that we take first lines of famous pieces of art and then use them for our own stories. The first line that I decided to use is from Henry V by William Shakespeare: “O for a muse of fire that would ascend/The brightest heaven of invention.” And the reason that I used that particular one is because it always created a very vibrant image for me of an actual muse of fire. Now the story that I write doesn’t have much to do with Henry V but it certainly does have to do with muses of fire and so I hope you enjoy that. Now one of the things that I also like about this story, and writing short stories in the general sense, is that it allows me to do something different than what I usually do when I write novels. My novels are science fictional, they are often humorous, they have a lot of action, and so on and so forth, and every once in a while it’s nice to change things up and try some things that are not necessarily automatically supposed to be in my wheelhouse, as it were. So this was an opportunity to sort of stretch and to do something a little bit different. So when you read it, I hope that you enjoy John Scalzi doing something a little bit unexpected.
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