HOMEWARD-BOUND
The big ground-effect
ship rumbles softly as it cruises across the endless expanse of the
Dzerzhinsky Ocean at nearly three hundred knots, homeward-bound at
last. Misha sits in his cubbyhole—as shipboard political officer he
rates an office of his own—and sweats over his report with the aid
of a glass of Polish pear schnapps. Radio can’t punch through more
than a few thousand miles of air directly, however powerful the
transmitters; on Earth they used to bounce signals off the
ionosphere or the moon, but that doesn’t work here—the other disks
are too far away to use as relays. There’s a chain of transceiver
buoys marching out across the ocean at two-thousand-kilometer
intervals, but the equipment is a pig to maintain, very expensive
to build, and nobody is even joking about stringing undersea cables
across a million kilometers of seafloor. Misha’s problem is that
the expedition, himself included, is effectively stranded back in
the eighteenth century, without even the telegraph to tie
civilization together—which is a pretty pickle to find yourself in
when you’re the bearer of news that will make the Politburo shit a
brick. He desperately wants to be able to boost this up the ladder
a bit, but instead it’s going to be his name and his alone on the
masthead.
“Bastards. Why
couldn’t they give us a signal rocket or two?” He gulps back what’s
left of the schnapps and winds a fresh sandwich of paper and carbon
into his top-secret-eyes-only typewriter.
“Because it would
weigh too much, Misha,” the captain says right behind his left
shoulder, causing him to jump and bang his head on the overhead
locker.
When Misha stops
swearing and Gagarin stops chuckling, the Party man carefully turns
his stack of typescript face down on the desk, then politely
gestures the captain into his office. “What can I do for you, boss?
And what do you mean, they’re too heavy?”
Gagarin shrugs. “We
looked into it. Sure, we could put a tape recorder and a
transmitter into an ICBM and shoot it up to twenty thousand
kilometers. Trouble is, it’d fall down again in an hour or so. The
fastest we could squirt the message, it would cost about a thousand
rubles a character—more to the point, even a lightweight rocket
would weigh as much as our entire payload. Maybe in ten years.” He
sits down. “How are you doing with that report?”
Misha sighs. “How am
I going to explain to Brezhnev that the Americans aren’t the only
mad bastards with hydrogen bombs out here? That we’ve found the new
world and the new world is just like the old world, except it glows
in the dark? And the only communists we’ve found so far are
termites with guns?” For a moment he looks haggard. “It’s been nice
knowing you, Yuri.”
“Come on! It can’t be
that bad—” Gagarin’s normally sunny disposition is
clouded.
“You try and figure
out how to break the news to them.” After identifying the first set
of ruins, they’d sent one of their MiGs out, loaded with camera
pods and fuel: a thousand kilometers inland it had seen the same
ominous story of nuclear annihilation visited on an alien
civilization: ruins of airports, railroads, cities, factories. A
familiar topography in unfamiliar form.
This was New
York—once, thousands of years before a giant stamped the bottom of
Manhattan Island into the seabed—and that was once Washington DC.
Sure, there’d been extra skyscrapers, but they’d hardly needed the
subsequent coastal cruise to be sure that what they were looking at
was the same continent as the old capitalist enemy, thousands of
years and millions of kilometers beyond a nuclear war. “We’re
running away like a dog that’s seen the devil ride out, hoping that
he doesn’t spot us and follow us home for a new winter
hat.”
Gagarin frowns.
“Excuse me?” He points to the bottle of pear schnapps.
“You are my guest.”
Misha pours the first cosmonaut a glass, then tops up his own. “It
opens certain ideological conflicts, Yuri. And nobody wants to be
the bearer of bad news.”
“Ideological—such
as?”
“Ah.” Misha takes a
mouthful. “Well, we have so far avoided nuclear annihilation and
invasion by the forces of reactionary terror during the Great
Patriotic War, but only by the skin of our teeth. Now, doctrine has
it that any alien species advanced enough to travel in space is
almost certain to have discovered socialism, if not true Communism,
no? And that the enemies of socialism wish to destroy socialism and
take its resources for themselves. But what we’ve seen here is
evidence of a different sort. This was America. It follows that
somewhere nearby there is a continent that was home to another
Soviet Union—two thousand years ago. But this America has been
wiped out, and our elder Soviet brethren are not in evidence and
they have not colonized this other-America—what can this
mean?”
Gagarin’s brow
wrinkled. “They’re dead too? I mean, that the alternate-Americans
wiped them out in an act of colonialist imperialist aggression but
did not survive their treachery,” he adds hastily.
Misha’s lips quirk in
something approaching a grin: “Better work on getting your
terminology right the first time before you see Brezhnev, comrade,”
he says. “Yes, you are correct on the facts, but there are matters
of interpretation to consider. No
colonial exploitation has occurred. So either the perpetrators were
also wiped out, or perhaps . . . Well, it opens up several very
dangerous avenues of thought. Because if New Soviet Man isn’t home
hereabouts, it implies that something happened to them, doesn’t it?
Where are all the true communists? If it turns out that they ran
into hostile aliens, then . . . Well, theory says that aliens
should be good brother socialists. Theory and ten rubles will buy
you a bottle of vodka on this one. Something is badly wrong with
our understanding of the direction of history.”
“I suppose there’s no
question that there’s something we don’t know about,” Gagarin adds
in the ensuing silence, almost as an afterthought.
“Yes. And that’s a
fig leaf of uncertainty we can hide behind, I hope.” Misha puts his
glass down and stretches his arms behind his head, fingers
interlaced until his knuckles crackle. “Before we left, our agents
reported signals picked up in America from—damn, I should not be
telling you this without authorization. Pretend I said nothing.”
His frown returns.
“You sound as if
you’re having dismal thoughts,” Gagarin prods.
“I am having dismal thoughts, Comrade Colonel-General,
very dismal thoughts indeed. We have been behaving as if this world
we occupy is merely a new geopolitical game board, have we not?
Secure in the knowledge that brother socialists from beyond the
stars brought us here to save us from the folly of the imperialist
aggressors, or that anyone else we meet will be either barbarians
or good communists, we have fallen into the pattern of an earlier
age—expanding in all directions, recognizing no limits, assuming
our manifest destiny. But what if there are limits? Not a
barbed-wire fence or a line in the sand, but something more subtle.
Why does history demand success of us? What we know is the right
way for humans on a human world, with an industrial society, to
live. But this is not a human world. And what if it’s a world in
which we’re not destined to succeed? Or what if the very
circumstances that gave rise to Marxism are themselves transient,
in the broader scale? What if there is a—you’ll pardon me—a
materialist God? We know this is our own far future we are living
in. Why would any power vast enough to
build this disk bring us here?”
Gagarin shakes his
head. “There are no limits, my friend,” he says, a trifle
condescendingly. “If there were, do you think we would have gotten
this far?”
Misha thumps his desk
angrily. “Why do you think they put us somewhere where your
precious rockets don’t work?” he demands. “Get up on high, one push
of rocket exhaust, and you could be halfway to anywhere! But down
here we have to slog through the atmosphere. We can’t get away!
Does that sound like a gift from one friend to
another?”
“The way you are
thinking sounds paranoid to me,” Gagarin insists. “I’m not saying
you’re wrong, mind you: only—could you be overwrought? Finding
those bombed cities affected us all, I think.”
Misha glances out of
his airliner-sized porthole: “I fear there’s more to it than that.
We’re not unique, comrade; we’ve been here before. And we all died.
We’re a fucking duplicate, Yuri Alexeyevich, there’s a larger
context to all this. And I’m scared by what the Politburo will
decide to do when they see the evidence. Or what the Americans will
do . . .”