Russian Spring
Page 58
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GRAND TOUR NAVETTE MAIDEN FLIGHT PERFECT
Patrice Corneau, Director of the European Space Agency, has announced that last week’s shakedown cruise of the first Grand Tour Navette went almost perfectly. No significant problem with any system was discovered on the four-day cruise around the Moon. The flight was a complete success.
“This is the dawning of a new age in space for the human species,” Corneau declared. “Grand Tour Navettes will make lunar cities a real possibility, allow us to establish a permanent base on Mars, turn Spaceville into a money-making concern at last, take us to Jupiter, Saturn, and perhaps even beyond. Columbus discovered America and Magellan circumnavigated the Earth under sail, but it took the advent of the steamboat to begin to build a society that was truly global. That’s where we are in space now.”
—Agence France-Presse
* * *
XXIV
When Sonya went back to work, Jerry had little to do but watch television, read science fiction, and play with his computer. He had always hated TV dramas, the news these days was mostly about some election in the Ukraine that had all of Europe in an uproar, and the occasional item about the delays in the maiden voyage of the Grand Tour Navette.
And when, at last, he was constrained to sit alone in the living room and watch the main engines of his Grand Tour Navette fire up on television, watch the great ship gloriously and majestically warp out of orbit toward the Moon without him, watch it dwindle slowly into the starry blackness until all that was visible was the pale blue point of light of the exhaust moving like a man-made star across the firmament, that was more than he could bear of watching television. Nor could he endure the bitter thought of reading any more science fiction.
So after that, he disappeared into the bits and bytes, using his computer to access every data bank he could, researching the literature on cloning of brain tissue and implantable electronics, hoping to ferret out something along the cutting edge that would be applicable to his own condition.
There wasn’t very much. When it came to electronics, the hibernautika itself was the state of the art. No one was even working directly on the implantable electronics he needed to live a real life. Given six months or so of intensive research in the field, he might very well be able to design the circuits he needed himself—and he certainly had nothing but time on his hands—but the level of miniaturization needed to produce practical implants seemed about a decade away.
Cloning of brain tissue was another matter, and, in its way, even more frustrating. The Americans were still way ahead in biotechnology—that and the endless elaboration of space-weapon technology were about the only areas in which the United States was still on the cutting edge—but the latest wrinkle in the endlessly exfoliating National Security Act barred access to American data banks to users outside the United States, he could find no way to break through the blocks, and the only way to even get hints about what was going on in the States was from vague secondary and tertiary sources limited to what was published in the popular press.
The Americans had succeeded in cloning whole rat brains, but as part of some ghoulish military program. What they seemed to be doing was cloning brains from rat genomes, then immediately subjecting them to some kind of polymerization process, which preserved them in amber, as it were, so that they needed no biological matrix. The dead brains—if they were ever biologically viable in the first place, a point that seemed deliberately obscured—could then, at least in theory, be used as highly miniaturized circuit boards for complex missile guidance systems.
It didn’t seem very applicable to his own problem, and in any case, it was all under a military security lid. Still, if and when the work was duplicated in Europe, there might just be something to it. The ability to clone rodent brains implied the ability to clone human brain tissue. And even if the product was not biologically viable, if it could indeed be polymerized and programmed, it certainly would lick the miniaturization problem, the lost brain tissue could be replaced by a polymerized and programmed clone of itself.
It wasn’t much, it might be at least a decade away, but it was something. And it was the only hope he was able to find, however vague and distant, in all his weeks of research.
And the knowledge of it forced him into the one area he had dreaded exploring.
His heartbeat for the most part had seemed regular and normal, and he really had no problem breathing. He experienced no discomfort, and he felt strong and healthy. But there were moments . . .
Sometimes when he spoke long sentences rapidly and loudly, he felt a certain tension between his voluntary breath control and the forced breathing rhythm of the machinery. And if he forced his way through it, and built up a carbon dioxide surplus and oxygen debt, there was a lag before the circuitry increased his involuntary breath-rate to compensate, leaving him out of breath and dizzy for a few moments.
Once in a while, he awoke from a nightmare with his heart racing. Sometimes he seemed to feel the blood rushing behind his eardrums. Erections tended to make him feel light-headed, they were short-lived, and he was afraid to do anything with them. If he stood up too abruptly, he experienced a frisson of vertigo. When he tried a little aerobic exercise—a few jumping jacks—his lungs seemed to be working too hard and his heart too little.
The hibernautika was good, but the circuitry had been designed to control the heartbeat and respiration of cosmonauts in a steady state of rest, indeed in hibernation. The programming had been modified for normal activity, but he suspected that the complex natural feedback-loops between heartbeat and respiration were less than perfectly modeled.
How good was the hibernautika? How well would his health hold up over decades?
Jerry avoided looking into this question as long as he could, but once he had found out everything possible about implantable electronics, the future of miniaturization, the cloned and polymerized rat brains, once he had a picture of the long-term possibilities, there was nothing for it but to at last learn what was known about his present situation.
There was nothing at all in the literature about the long-term biological effects of the hibernautika. If the Russians had done any such experiments, they were under a tight security lid.
But after all, the hibernautika was only a miniaturized version of the much bulkier life-support equipment they had used in the hospital, that machinery had been around for years, and there would be no security lid in that area.
Brain damage like his was quite rare, and the machinery had mostly been used to keep bodies of massively brain-damaged victims going to supply organs for transplants, or as a temporary expedient during operations or recovery from cerebral edemas.
Extensive search yielded only seven cases similar to his, where the machinery had been used as a permanent means of maintaining the lives of otherwise viable patients.
None of them had survived past twenty-two months.
The case histories were chilling.
Blood clots. Weakened arteries. Aneurysms. Emphysema. Cerebral hemorrhages. Arrthythmias.
Two of the patients had died of massive strokes, suddenly, and comparatively mercifully. They were the lucky ones.
The others had slid downhill slowly from accumulated mini-strokes, minor heart malfunctions, progressive emphysema, and blood-vessel damage. They had suffered successive small episodes of brain damage, loss of bowel and bladder control, slow deterioration of higher cerebral functions, they had gone out as mental vegetables, but not before they had endured months of slowly watching their own minds decay. Those were the only two prognoses.
If he was lucky, he would die quickly of a massive stroke.
If he was not, what he had to look forward to was under two years of a slow wasting away in physical and mental agony.
He turned off the computer and sat there in front of the dead screen for a long, long while, not even thinking, hardly even feeling, as if he had become a human vegetable already.
Then he began to cr
y. That went on for a long time, as he just sat there, wallowing in self-pity, devoid of all coherent thought.
Then, finally, he was able to feel anger.
The goddamn doctors had lied to him! They had treated him like a child!
What right did the bastards have to lie to me like that? What right did they have to lie to Sonya?
Sonya . . .
Of course.
Suddenly all the rage went whooshing out of him. No, the doctors had not been cruel, they had been merciful after their fashion. He was a man, he had endured disappointment, despair, and frustration all of his life, he had lost his country, and his son, and his marriage, and his dream. He could take it. He was taking it now, wasn’t he?
But Sonya . . .
No, the doctors had been right not to tell Sonya. She would fall apart. She would go to pieces. All the guilt of her affair with Ilya Pashikov, of the divorce, of the success of her life and the ultimate tragic failure of his, would come crashing down upon her, would bury her in despair and self-loathing.
Jerry sighed. Face it, he told himself, she only took you back home out of a sense of guilty responsibility; this has been no passionate romantic reunion. We sleep in the same bed, but we don’t make love. I’m a patient, not a husband.
And yet . . .
And yet wasn’t this an expression of love, love of a pale, attenuated kind? And if she knew the truth, would not even that be turned entirely into an unbearable pity?
Unbearable, in the end, to both of them.
Sonya must never know.
And if in the end that was really going to be impossible, well, at least let her keep the illusion of hope as long as possible, let the months of despair be comparatively few, let what little time they had left together be as easy for her as he could contrive to make it.
He owed her that much, didn’t he? A last act of love on the way out.
So by the time Sonya came home from work, Jerry had pulled himself together. He wiped all mention of the truth from his computer’s memory, just in case. He greeted her at the door, he kissed her, he smiled, he even helped her prepare dinner as he used to long, long ago.
He nodded pleasantly all through dinner as she went on about the details of her day’s work, and he even tried to at least seem to be paying attention to her babble about the Ukrainian crisis.
Sonya had been pleased, if a bit bemused, at his uncharacteristic interest in political affairs, but she seemed to suspect nothing, and after dinner, when she asked him about his day, he made up some nonsense about research he had been doing on wormholes and cosmic strings, which made about as much sense to her as the politics had to him, and the evening glided smoothly by.
Indeed, by the time it was time to go to bed, Jerry had managed to talk himself up out of the pit, and he drifted off to sleep quickly.
But in the middle of the night, he dreamed he was floating freely in space at last, orbiting the Earth weightlessly, watching the cloud deck and the continents drift by, swimming through the vacuum effortlessly and joyfully in his spacesuit like a cosmic porpoise, walking on water at last. . . .
And then there was some kind of suit malfunction, and his air was cut off, and the icy cold of space poured in, and the breath was sucked from his lungs, and—
He awoke in bed gasping for breath, his heart beating slowly and stupidly in his chest. It took only a few moments for the hibernautika circuitry to regularize his heartbeat and respiration, but in those moments the vision was cold and cruel and clear.
He was going to die, and soon.
In that moment, the confrontation with his own impending mortality was realer than it had been all day, the terror of it was quite overwhelming.
But as he lay there in the darkness, he found a source of strength in it too. For once you face the inevitability of your own death, really face it, there is a power that comes to you.
For life itself was the last thing that anyone had to give up. And once you know for a certainty that you have to give up that too, why it all becomes crystal clear, as clear, and as hard, and as sharp-edged as the stars seen from beyond the mists of the atmosphere.
What do you do when everything else is gone? When you know you literally have nothing left to give up?
You walk on water.
If only for a moment at the very end.
KRESKOV CALLS FOR ELECTION LAW REFORM
Delegate Piotyr Andreiovich Kreskov of Novosibirsk introduced a resolution calling for election reform into the Supreme Soviet and then withdrew it after Ethnic Nationalists and Eurorussians alike shouted him down.
“With all the attention fixed on the impending Ukrainian Presidential election, it somehow seems to have escaped everyone’s attention that the present system, which allows constituent republics to choose the dates for their own elections, is going to result in a hideous mess,” Kreskov pointed out. “If, as seems inevitable, Vadim Kronkol is elected President of the Ukraine, we’re going to end up right in the middle of the worst crisis since the Great Patriotic War, with an election campaign for this body and the Soviet Presidency going on! If the Supreme Soviet would pass a law synchronizing these elections, we could be spared the paralysis this is certain to bring.”
After Ethnic Nationalist delegations shouted their outrage at this latest attempt by centralist Great Russian hegemonists to usurp the sovereign powers of the constituent republics and Eurorussian delegates wrung their hands in despair at this clumsy provocation on the part of the well-known Bear, Kreskov rather lamely explained that he was not suggesting that anything could be done about it now, but that the present crisis had merely pointed to a flaw in the constitution that needed to be addressed once it was over.
“He knew just what he was doing,” many Eurorussian delegates charged afterward. “It was a clear attempt to incite chauvinistic outrage between Russians and Ethnic Nationalists, and it certainly succeeded.”
—Novosti
“He’s been living on the phone, Franja, he’s got them all roped into this crazy scheme,” Mother said. “I don’t know how to stop it, I don’t know what to tell him, I’m at my wits’ end.”
It had been five days since Franja had been able to get back to Paris, and during that time Father would seem to have been as busy as the maniacs in the Ukraine. The last time she had been home, all this had seemed like a harmless fantasy, indeed Mother herself had even been more or less encouraging it as a way to keep his spirits up, and Father had certainly seemed like his old space-obsessed self, minus the bitterness, and the anti-Soviet tirades.
He had babbled about it endlessly during every meal, and Mother had just sat there, and smiled, and let him rave on.
The shakedown cruise of the first Grand Tour Navette had been such a complete success that they were already starting to boost components into orbit with which to assemble the second. The news coverage had been extensive, it had been the ideal diversion from the impending crisis in the Ukraine, and there had even been a rather long feature interview with the Father of the Grand Tour Navette that had been carried on Vremya.
Franja had caught it back home in Moscow. Ivan was in town at the same time for once, and he had been complaining of late that she had hardly spent any time at all with him since her father’s accident, taking off-days in Paris she could have spent in Moscow with him. He had actually started to act jealous of the attention she was lavishing on her invalid father—at his expense, or so at least Ivan seemed to be beginning to see it. So she had made sure they watched the interview together, hoping that it would somehow make him understand, smooth the troubled waters.
And it had.
Ivan had fidgeted and cursed under his breath during the inevitable lead story on the Ukrainian election, but when Jerry Reed’s image appeared on the videowall—a full establishing shot of Father sitting on the living room couch with the hibernautika console conspicuously in evidence—his broad strong face had softened, the frown lines smoothed out, and he had taken her hand and squeezed it.
The interviewer had tried to squeeze the maximum bathos out of Father’s present condition, but Father, smiling rather dreamily and bravely, seemed to be fighting her every inch of the way, going on about the wonderful Soviet device that was keeping him alive, how fitting it was that it was a piece of space-program spin-off, how symbolic it was of the transnational spirit of the European Space Agency, how grateful he was to have played a part in this epic moment of human history, almost as if Tass had written his lines for him.
“I hope those bastards in the Ukraine are watching this!” Ivan said. “An American going on like this about transnational solidarity! But you always told me that your father loathed the Soviet Union . . . ?”
Franja couldn’t understand it either. “He always used to,” she said. “I guess it took a hard hit on the head to bring him to his senses.”
“Hmmm . . . I wish Gorchenko had the balls to apply the same therapy to the blockheads in Kiev. . . .”
“And finally, what do you see for the future, Mr. Reed?” the interviewer said, as the camera moved in for a concluding close-up on Father.
But Father had not taken the opportunity to present his vision of mankind’s destiny as a space-going species. Instead, he had stared directly and dreamy-eyed into the camera, and smiled a sad little, brave little, quite heartrending smile.