Fall Revolution 4: The Sky Road

engines and hooves and feet, rose from the street
below. I turned back into the room and finished the beer, then
undressed and went into the sluice-shower and washed myself down.
The water ran cold just before I got the last soap-suds off; I
gritted my teeth and persisted, then leapt out and dried myself
off while the electric kettle boiled. I filled a ewer with a
mixture of cold and hot water and shaved carefully, then set some
coffee to brew while I got dressed: in the same trousers and
waistcoat as I’d worn the previous night, but I thought the
occasion deserved a clean shirt.
    The bed was close enough to the table for the two items of
furniture to form a somewhat unergonomic desk. I sat down with
the coffee and looked at the stack of books and papers I’d
brought with me to read over the summer. I reached over and
hauled avolume from the stack, cursed and got up and found a rag
and wiped dust and cobwebs from all the books, washed my hands
and sat down again. Sipping the cooling coffee, turning over the
pages, I tried to focus my mind on the matters they
contained.
    When I was awakened for a third time by my forehead hitting
the table I gave up and poured another coffee and turned my mind
to my real worry, the one I didn’t want to think about:
what if Merrial were simply using me? That she had sought me out
in the first place because she wanted me to do a job for her?
    I walked up and down the room’s narrow length, turning
the question over almost as often as I turned around. After
several iterations I decided that I couldn’t have been
fooled about her feelings, that her passion was real – and
that if she’d been intent on manipulating me, she would
have done it more subtly –
    But then, perhaps that itself was evidence of how subtly
she’d done it. At that point I stopped. To suspect
manipulation that subtle – an apparently clumsy and obvious
approach disguising one devious and elegant – was to
undermine the very confidence in my own judgement on which all
such discriminations must perforce rely.
    So I forgot my suspicions, and looked once more at the books,
and at a quarter before eight went out into the evening to meet
her, and my fate.

 
4
Paper Tigers
     
    Three flags hung behind the coffin: the Soviet, red with gold
hammer and sickle; the Kazakhstani, blue with yellow sun and
eagle; and the ISTWR, yellow with black trefoil.
    About two hundred people were crammed into the hall of the
crematorium. The funeral was the nearest thing to a State
occasion the republic had had since the Sputnik centenary. The
entire depleted apparat was there, and a good proportion of the
workers, peasants and intelligentsia was probably watching on
television. The distinguished foreign guests included the
Kazakhstani consul, the head of the Western United States
Interests Section, and David Reid, who was wedged between a
couple of Mutual Protection greps. Myra sat with the rest of
Sovnarkom in the front row, dry-eyed, as one of Georgi’s
old comrades – another Afganets – delivered the
eulogy.
    ‘Major Georgi Yefrimovich Davidov was born in Alma-Ata
in 1956. At school, in the Pioneers and the Komsomol, he soon
distinguished himself as an exemplary individual –
studious, civic-minded, with great athletic prowess. After
obtaining a degree at the University of Kazakhstan, where he
joined the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, he completed his
national service and chose a military career. In 1979 he
qualified as a helicopter pilot, and later that same year was
among the first of the limited contingent of the Soviet armed
forces to fulfil their internationalist duty to the peoples of
Afghanistan.’
    A ripple of dissidence, expressed with indrawn breaths, or
sighs, or shifting of feet, went through the room. Myra herself
sniffed, compressed her lips, looked down. All those nights
he’d woken her by grabbing her, holding her, talking away
his nightmares; all those mornings when he’d said not a
word, given no indication that he remembered any interruption to
his sleep, or to hers.
    The speaker raised his voice a little and continued
undaunted.
    ‘His service earned him promotion and the honour of Hero
of the Soviet Union. In 1985 he applied for transfer to the space
programme, and after training at Baikonur he won the proud title
of Cosmonaut of the Soviet Union. However, many decades were to
pass before he was able to fulfil this part of