It took her several days to get up the courage to tell her parents, but finally one night at dinner, when the entrecôte béarnaise had come out right, and the Bordeaux had been excellent, and they all had managed to get through the salad course and into a good chocolate gâteau and perfect coffee without any untoward event, she managed to ease into it.
“I think it would be a good idea for me to get away by myself for a while and find someplace quiet and sunny to think,” she said. “I’ll come back through Paris to see you for a week or so before I go back to Gagarin . . . if I go back. . . .”
“If you go back?” Mother said. “All this talking about quitting isn’t really serious? So you haven’t had such a good year academically, it’s just a matter of getting down to work and trying harder.”
“I told you a thousand times, Mother, I’ve been working as hard as I can, but I just can’t fight the politics.”
“You’re sure you’re not just using that as an excuse?”
“You know me well enough,” Franja shot back in exasperation. “Am I a shirker? Have I ever been afraid of hard work?”
“No, but—”
“I’ve been right all along, Sonya,” Father said bitterly. “First they do it to me, and now they—”
“Enough, Jerry! The question is, what are we going to do about it?”
“What can we do about it?”
“I can talk to Ilya—”
“The Golden Boy!”
“Ilya’s well connected, he’s certainly proven—”
“Far be it from me to deny that your colleague Pashikov is well connected with the shits in Moscow,” Father shot back contemptuously. “But might I point out that a good word from Ilya would be the last thing in the world to improve Franja’s situation?”
“Oh really?”
“Imagine how kindly these Bears or Mother Russia Fuckers or whatever they call themselves would feel toward our daughter if they get dragged onto the carpet on the word of some Westernized degenerate in an Yves Saint-Laurent suit like Ilya Pashikov!” Father exclaimed. “It’d be almost as useful as a personal letter of recommendation from the President of the United States!”
Mother glared at him silently. Franja wished she were somewhere on the Black Sea already.
“So what do you suggest, Jerry?” Sonya finally said.
“I could talk to Emile Lourade—”
“You can’t even get him on the phone!”
“Well Corneau then . . . ,” Father muttered weakly. “He owes me, Franja could transfer to the ESA program, and—”
“Corneau! You can’t even get him to give you an office with a window!”
Father sighed. He looked so forlorn and defeated that Franja wanted to get up and hug him. For the first time she understood, really understood, what it must be like for him to see all his dreams defeated, to see his daughter’s dreams defeated, and to be unable to do anything to help her either.
“I guess there’s not much we can really do for you, Franja,” Father finally said softly. “That’s a bitter thing for parents to have to admit, you know. . . .”
“That’s the truest thing you’ve said in months, Jerry,” Mother said sadly. “We like to think we’re in charge of our lives, but sometimes things and forces beyond our control . . .” She threw up her hands. “Sometimes it’s hard to know when to start blaming others and stop blaming yourself. . . .”
A strange look passed between her and Father, a ghost of a smile, a sad recognition of something private between them. But in the next moment it seemed to have passed, as Father’s face hardened, and he looked away from Mother, and stared directly into his daughter’s eyes.
“But that’s no excuse for giving up,” Father said. “Stick it out. And if you can’t get into the Cosmonaut school, take whatever you can get that will give you time out of the gravity well. You’re young, and the golden age of space exploration is just beginning, and when the Grand Tour Navettes become operational, they’re gonna have to dig deep. Get up there, Franja, get up there however you can. And someday, you’ll see, it’ll be you and me, out there on our way to the Moon, to Mars, even. You and me, Franja, they’re not gonna make it easy for us, but we’re gonna do it. You believe that, don’t you? Don’t you, Franja?”
Franja’s eyes filled with tears. “You’re such a space cadet, Father,” she stammered. “You only believe all that because you’re a hopeless romantic.”
Mother’s eyes seemed to moisten too, and she looked directly at Father with a wistful tenderness that Franja had not seen between them for the entire two weeks she had been home, now, ironically enough, on the very eve of her departure. And indeed, she sensed, because of her imminent departure, somehow.
“I won’t give up,” Franja blurted hastily in the wan hope of preserving the moment. “I promise,” she said. “Because I believe it too.”
Which, of course, she did not, but it didn’t take her more than a few days thinking about it on the beach near Nice to realize that there was really nothing else for her to do.
Besides, she had given her word, and lightly made or not at the time, she found that a promise to her parents at this sad pass between them was not something that she had the heart to break. If Bobby had been the cause of this rupture, she had to do what she could to heal it, and under the circumstances, not disappointing them, while not very much, was all that she had in her meager power to do.
So at the end of the summer she went back to Gagarin University and threw herself into her studies as if even harder work would be enough to overcome all obstacles. But although her grades did improve somewhat, at the end of the year, when the names of those who had been admitted to the Cosmonaut school were announced, hers was not among them.
She was in a foul mood indeed when she went in for her appointment with Vassily Yurovets, the so-called Career Guidance Counselor, the meeting that would decide the course of her final year at Gagarin, for whatever that would be worth, which at the moment did not seem like much.
Yurovets was a beefy red-faced man in his early fifties with receding blond hair and a body that seemed held together against a tendency to fat by rigorous exercise and iron will. He had been a Cosmonaut Pilot himself, until the onset of high blood pressure had forced his permanent grounding, and the walls of his office were decorated with photographs of Cosmograds, Mars ships, old comrades, and himself standing in a spacesuit on the surface of the Moon with the Soviet lunar station in the background.
“So . . . Franja Gagarin Reed . . . ,” Yurovets said, punching up her records on his terminal. He frowned, he shook his head. “What a name!” he said. “You are related to the Yuri?”
“No, I’m not,” Franja said. If I was, she thought sourly, I’d probably be on my way to the Cosmonaut school now.
Yurovets glanced back at the screen, then studied Franja speculatively. “It says here that your father is an American named Jerry Reed. . . ,” he said.
Oh no, Franja thought miserably, please don’t you be a damned Bear too!
“This would not be by some wild chance the Jerry Reed?” Yurovets said.
“The Jerry Reed?”
“The American defector who created the Grand Tour Navette concept . . . ?”
“That’s my father,” Franja admitted grudgingly. “You’ve heard of him?”
“Of course I’ve heard of him!” Yurovets declared. “I read the original magazine article back before . . . well, back when I was still a cosmonaut. What an inspiration! And now that we are actually in the process of fulfilling his vision . . .” He frowned. “You, ah, will pardon my indelicacy, but your father, he is still alive?”
Franja nodded.
“Then why is he not directing the project?” Yurovets demanded.
“That, Comrade Yurovets, is a long sad story,” Franja told him cautiously. “A rather political one . . .”
Yurovets nodded his head, pursed his lips. “I see. . . ,” he muttered. “So the bastards are everywhere, even in ESA. . . .”<
br />
“Comrade Yurovets?”
Vassily Yurovets seemed to snap back into focus. “Well, we are not here to discuss your father’s glorious past, but his daughter’s future,” he said briskly.
“Such as it is,” Franja muttered disconsolately.
Yurovets cocked an admonitory eyebrow.
“That is to say,” Franja stammered quickly, “what I really want to be is a cosmonaut, but—”
“An entirely admirable ambition,” Yurovets said. “But these grades . . .”
“I know—”
“And this kharakteristika, and what’s this, you’re not even a Soviet citizen! What a mess!”
“I plan to take Soviet citizenship as soon as I reach my legal majority,” Franja told him.
“But why not already? Surely you realize—”
“Surely I do, Comrade Yurovets!” Franja declared. “But my father—”
“Won’t sign the papers because he won’t have any part of his daughter becoming a Soviet citizen because the Russians are preventing him from achieving his own ambitions?”
“There you have it,” Franja said miserably.
Vassily Yurovets drummed his fingers on the desktop. “I begin to see the vector,” he muttered. “Let us dig a bit deeper. . . .”
He spent several minutes playing with his keyboard, staring at his screen, muttering under his breath. Finally he looked at Franja, steepled his fingers, seemed to hesitate before he spoke.
“This must go no further, you understand, and I will strenuously deny that the following conversation ever took place . . . ,” he said.
“Comrade Yurovets . . . ?”
“I have compared your class grades with your examination marks, and in many instances they do not properly correlate at all,” Yurovets said. “And as for the instructors in question, their proclivities are all too well known. . . .”
“Proclivities . . . ?”
“Let us not mince words!” Yurovets said angrily. “They are all a gang of Russian chauvinist Bears! The bastards! It makes my honest Ukrainian blood boil! Do not think that you are the only one who has suffered injustice at the hands of these swine! Whole peoples writhe under their yoke!”
Franja did not quite know how to take this outburst, but for the first time in a long while, she allowed herself to feel a glimmer of hope.
“So let us speak with brutal frankness,” Yurovets went on. “While you probably would not have achieved the grades necessary to enter the Cosmonaut school anyway, the fact remains that you have been the victim of unreconstructed Russian chauvinism as much as any Ukrainian, and against the daughter of Jerry Reed, at that. The honor of this institution, the Cosmonaut corps, and what the Soviet Union is supposed to be demands that this imbalance be redressed somehow. . . .”
His anger subsided somewhat, and he threw up his hands. “Not that there is all that much that I am in a position to do,” he admitted. “However . . . Speak from the heart, Franja Reed—what is it that you really want?”
“To be a cosmonaut!” Franja said.
Yurovets sighed. “Admission to the Cosmonaut school is out of the question,” he said. “But perhaps there is another path . . . difficult, true, problematic as well, but . . . How badly do you want to be a cosmonaut? What sacrifices are you willing to make? What chances are you willing to take?”
“Name them!” Franja declared.
“What this meeting is supposed to be about is your area of specialization for your final year,” Yurovets told her. “Students are allowed to choose on the basis of their class standings until the quotas for the various specialties are filled, and since, despite the machinations of the Bears, you are in the top half of your class, your choice is a fairly wide one. Nevertheless, I advise you to select a specialty that is considered among the least desirable. Equipment maintenance technician.”
“Maintenance technician!” Franja moaned. “Glorified dockhand!”
“Just so,” Yurovets said. “Few students volunteer for that! But it will get you out of the gravity well, and let me tell you as a cosmonaut, that five or ten years from now, when the Grand Tour Navettes are operational, there will be a need for crews that the graduates of the Cosmonaut school will not be able to completely fill. And believe me, when we are forced to pluck people out of the ranks, they will be people with experience in space, however lowly, not a bunch of groundlings with fancy degrees!”
Franja goggled at Vassily Yurovets in amazement. “My father told me much the same thing!” she said.
“Did he?” Yurovets exclaimed. He positively beamed at her. “What an honor!” He laughed. “Great minds, it would seem, run along the same channels after all!”
He grew more serious, somber, even. “Perhaps in the future these things may change, but right now your kharakteristika is a dreadful mess, and what you sorely need is a great big gold star, so to speak, which I will gladly inscribe in your records if you agree . . .”
“Agree to what?”
“If you take my advice and train as a maintenance technician, I will, shall we say, embellish the record a bit,” Yurovets said. “The way it will read is that you marched in here like a good little Stakhanovite, eyes gleaming with patriotic fervor, and before I could get my mouth open, you positively demanded the honor of becoming a maintenance technician for the good of the Motherland, knowing all too well that the unfortunate bourgeois egoism of too many of your less idealistic classmates has led them to eschew such vital honest proletarian labor in favor of cynical self-serving careerism. Or words to that effect.”
Franja could not help bursting into laughter. “Would anyone actually believe such nonsense?” she said.
Vassily Yurovets shrugged. “People who can believe that Joseph Stalin was anything but a madman and a monster or that Russians should rule this great nation of ours forever by right of blood are fully capable of believing anything!” he declared. “Even that a girl like you could be as much of a self-righteous ass as they are!”
* * *
ARE WE STILL REALLY ALONE?
Some may find it peculiar that the unequivocal discovery of some sort of extraterrestrial civilization on the fourth planet of Barnard’s star has done so little to transform our own. A certain excitement, the sending of messages, and now the Barnards have been pretty much forgotten by the general public. More than forgotten, perhaps, deliberately put out of mind.
All of us now living will, after all, be dead before an answer from the Barnards, if it ever comes, can possibly reach us. Most people don’t like thinking about that. It’s too much a reminder of our own mortality. And those of us who do think about it are frustrated by a great mystery whose answer we know we will never live to learn.
One wonders whether the Barnards will feel much the same when they receive our messages. But that too, alas, is a question whose answer those now living are fated never to learn.
Those of us who do care are fated to die knowing we were born out of our proper time.
—Space and Time
* * *
XVII
Franja had flown in Concordskis on regular flights between Paris and Moscow, but this was something else again.
She was bussed to the Star City airport, along with half a dozen other newly graduated maintenance techs, and loaded on the plane with no waiting and no formalities. This Concordski was a Space Ministry job, with a cabin that had been chopped in half to make room for extra cargo in the rear. The overhead video screens that replaced the windows on commercial Concordskis were absent, and nobody bothered with the familiar safety and oxygen mask instructions.
The door was sealed, the plane began to move, it stopped, shuddered as the turbofans went through their run-up, and then it took off. There were about forty passengers on the flight, reading books and magazines, passing flasks of vodka, or just catching a snooze. It should have been a boring, claustrophobic, and depressing experience.
But it wasn’t. For this was not a flight to Paris but to orbit, to Cosmogra
d Sagdeev; at long last, the year’s tedium was over and Franja was on her way up out of the gravity well.
The best that could be said about her year’s training as an equipment maintenance technician was that, after what she had gone through in her first two years at Gagarin, the work was easy, the competition nonexistent, and the instructors quite indifferent to both her background and her accent.
Her fellow students were the dregs of the University—dullards who considered themselves lucky to have gotten this far or slackers who spent most of the time cursing their misfortune. The instructors were mostly middle-aged ex space techs whose primary concern was familiarizing the students with the tools and the equipment, true working-class types uninterested for the most part in politics, who considered themselves fortunate to have retired into these sinecures, held their indifferent students in equally indifferent contempt, and were somewhat pleased, not to say bemused, by Franja’s diligence and enthusiasm.
But now all that was over, and the great adventure was beginning!
Franja’s only disappointment was that she was being denied the glorious view and had to content herself with imagining it in her mind’s eye: the blue sky purpling to black and the Earth falling away as the Concordski’s main engines took over with a satisfying slap of the seatback against her body, the planet’s surface curving and the stars coming out as the plane rose faster and faster through the upper atmosphere, the judder, the hesitation, and the sudden change in the music of the vibrations as the Concordski’s engines went to internal oxidizer for the final kick to orbital velocity, and then—
The vibrations stopped and the plane glided along in perfect silence as Franja felt a sudden slightly queasy floating sensation. She loosened her seat belt and felt herself rising up off her seat against it. She wormed her hand between the seat and her butt and squealed in delight as it fitted loosely into the gap.
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