Russian Spring (61 page)

His anger had quite evaporated. Real worry was plainly visible on his face. Was it possible that he really did still care?

“Anything to do with a review of Party status,” she told him. “Shorchov would like nothing more than to see my Party card lifted. . . .”

“They’d really do that?”

Sonya shrugged. “Probably not,” she said. “Probably they’re just calling me in on the carpet. But review of Party status is an official proceeding, and it will appear on my kharakteristika. And that’s bad enough, what with all the black marks I have already. . . .”

Jerry’s arm touched her shoulder. “You’re really this worried about that kind of bureaucratic bullshit?”

Sonya looked into his eyes, bobbed her head. “Yes,” she said, “I am.”

Jerry looked back, and she could see the pain in his eyes when he said it, feel the shame of it knot her own gut, knowing what it must be costing him. “Surely your good friend the Golden Boy can take care of it, can’t he?” he said with no irony in his voice.

“Not this,” she said. “If he tried, that in itself would be a black mark on
his
kharakteristika too.”

“And you wouldn’t want to risk that, would you?” Jerry shot back, and all at once she could see him withdrawing, sense that a moment that might have been was already past.

“I couldn’t, it wouldn’t be fair,” she told him from the other side of the wall that, after all, still lay between them.

CONGRESS OF PEOPLES CONVENED IN PARIS

Delegates from separatist movements from all over Common Europe opened their four-day meeting at Port Maillot today, designed to draw up a charter for an ongoing Congress of Peoples which will promote the rights of so-called national minorities. Groups represented include Basques, Scots, Ukrainians, Walloons, Slovaks, Welsh, Bavarians, Uzbeks, Corsicans, Catalans, and Bretons.

While there seems to be no general agreement on ultimate goals, there does seem to be a consensus that those European nationalities that do not have their own nation-states within the Common European framework must band together to bring about structural alterations that
will further de-emphasize the already-diminished sovereignty of the member states in favor of building what a huge banner hung inside the meeting hall calls “A Europe of Peoples, not Nations.”

—
Le Monde

Oh how Jerry Reed hated this prison cell of his dreams!

When Corneau had assigned him the low-status windowless office, Jerry hadn’t really cared, even though he knew what it implied in the pecking order, for he had no interest in such bureaucratic games. He had a desk, a chair, and a computer terminal, and as far as he was concerned that was all he needed to do his work.

While everyone else was tied up in endless meetings during the setup phase, he was able to spend his time at the computer turning his old conceptual renderings into blueprints for actual hardware. By the time the maneuvering system section had been set up without him, under Steinholz, he already had plans detailed enough to break up into hardware specs for subcontractor bids.

Rather than slap Steinholz in the face with them, he had taken them directly to Patrice Corneau. “I can see you haven’t been wasting your time, Jerry,” Patrice had told him. “It’s possible we can use some of this. I’ll pass it along to Velnikov and ask him to have Steinholz take a look.”

“What are you talking about, Patrice? These are complete plans for the maneuvering system, ready to let out for bid. We can save months!”

The project director shook his head. “That’s really being naive, Jerry,” he said. “We can’t start subcontractor bidding until
all
systems and components have been firmed up into hardware specs. Your maneuvering system specs look very good in isolation, but how can we know how well they will integrate with the specs for the other systems until those specs exist?”

Reluctantly, Jerry had been forced to agree, and in the months that followed, as he continued to design his own versions of various subsystems in isolation, he watched, via his terminal, with a galling mixture of personal anger and professional satisfaction, as Steinholz’s team slowly and meticulously duplicated his own work at a snail’s pace, making only minor modifications to justify their existence.

But when he showed Corneau preliminary specs for the framework and propulsion systems, Patrice had shaken his head. “This is all quite elegant, Jerry,” he said. “But it’s all pretty irrelevant.”

“Irrelevant? What do you mean, irrelevant?”

Corneau shrugged. “For the most part, you’re simply duplicating
work that others are already doing. Some of it is quite parallel, some of it goes off at a tangent, none of it’s integrated with the overall design. What good are specs for a framework designed in isolation from the fuel balloon or the cabin? What’s the point of designing a propulsion system without a fix on the overall payload?”

“Well then, damn it, Patrice, why don’t you give me access to the main data banks so at least I can know what the hell is going on?” Jerry said irritably. “You just admitted that I have a need to know.”

Jerry’s terminal gave him access to the maneuvering system section’s data banks, but he was locked out of the data banks of the other design sections. Patrice was forever muttering vaguely about “access on a need-to-know basis” and promising to rectify the situation when “the time came.”

Surely what Corneau was telling him was that the time was
now
.

Corneau shrugged and avoided his eyes. “I’m afraid I can’t do that, Jerry,” he said.

“What do you mean, you can’t do it? You’re the project director, aren’t you?”

Patrice still wouldn’t look at him. “It’s a political position, after all, you know . . . ,” he muttered.

“No, I
don’t
know! What’s that supposed to mean?”

Corneau sighed. “It means that Velnikov would go through the ceiling if I allowed you general access,” he said.

“Velnikov! Who’s the project director, Patrice, you or that Russian bastard?”

“Let us say that Velnikov . . . has routes outside the normal chain of command,” Corneau said. “There’s a lot of Russian money in this project, and he’s, well, he’s Moscow’s man. I don’t like it any better than you do, but there we have it.”

“We’ll see what Emile Lourade has to say about this!” Jerry snapped.

“This comes from Emile, Jerry,” Corneau told him. “The way things are set up, he’s answerable to Velnikov in certain matters too. . . .”

“Like my access to the main project data banks?”

“There you have it, Jerry,” Patrice admitted.

“Goddamn it, Patrice, you
promised
I’d have access to the whole project through you!”

“
Input
, Jerry, not
access
. And I’m not going back on that. I’ll put these specs into the main data banks where the frame and propulsion teams can consult them as much as they want to. And I’ll do the same with anything else you turn in.”

“Big deal!”

“That’s the best I can do,” Patrice said sadly. “That’s all I can do. I’m sorry, Jerry, really I am.”

So for want of anything else to do, Jerry continued to develop his own Grand Tour Navette hardware specs, dumping the results blindly into the main data banks and printing out his own hard copies, papering the walls of the office with them, even making fumbling and amateurish attempts to construct models, which by now filled most of the shelf space.

What would happen to him when the design phase was finished he did his best not to think about, just as he tried to avoid thinking about the son he might never see again, and Sonya’s affair with Ilya Pashikov.

There would hardly be a place in the project for a “maneuvering system design consultant” when the construction phase began, and it seemed certain that Velnikov would not allow Corneau to make him the head of any hands-on engineering team. Beyond the end of the design phase, the future was a featureless black void into which he dared not peer too deeply.

So too did he dare not confront Sonya directly. He knew that she was screwing the Golden Boy from time to time, and he let her know that he knew often enough, but she refused to acknowledge that he knew, and he would not force her to. For what would happen if he did was another void in his future he knew better than to gaze upon directly lest it turn his present to stone.

He could precipitate a crisis any time he chose by simply confronting her openly. And she could easily enough force him into it. But she didn’t. She never spent the night anywhere but their apartment on Avenue Trudaine. Just as he confined himself to oblique put-downs of Pashikov, she never went beyond defending him as a “good friend.”

And in some strange way, he managed to convince himself that she was playing the game this way because she still loved him somehow. Pashikov, after all, was well known for screwing every woman he could get his hands on, and Sonya herself joked about it. Perhaps that was her way of telling him that this affair was a thing that could never go any further, that she had chosen Pashikov for an occasional lover because he was safe, because a relationship with him was impossible, and hence he was no real threat to what was left of theirs. Indeed, he might even be keeping them together.

Did
he
still love her? That was another thing he dared not confront openly.

And yet . . .

And yet, agonizing as it might be, the configuration was stable. Life without Sonya was quite literally unimaginable, as unimaginable
as life without his work, futile or not. They were the two poles of his existence, they were all he had. And if both were beds of frustration, somehow each made the other bearable; that was a stable configuration too, and he dared not disturb it, for he could conceive of no other.

But though the end of the project’s design phase might be vague years in the future, last night’s call from the Soviet Embassy, and Sonya’s reaction to it, had in the end filled him with dread too.

But why was he
afraid?
What was he afraid of?

Although he could put no face on it, he could feel it coming. Something was rushing down the timeline toward him at hypersonic speed, silent and invisible until the moment of impact like an incoming missile, something that could shatter the fragile stability of his life’s configuration as surely as the end of the project’s design phase.

But this was not something that lay inevitably but safely in the vague future like the end of the design phase or the moment of death. It might be faceless and formless, but it would arrive at ground zero on Thursday.

While the bumper wheat crop in the Soviet Union has depressed current prices on the international market, wheat futures prices have actually risen due to the drought in the Midwest. The thinking seems to be that Washington will resist pressures to allow the sale of Russian grain in the American market, and the insurgents will diminish the harvest of the big crop coming to maturity in Patagonia.

But some contrarians are shorting wheat futures, looking to the new fields in mid-Canada to weigh in heavily in the next few weeks.

We say that the smart thing to do is stay out of wheat futures entirely. The apparent climatic shift has created too many uncertainties. There’s no reliable data base on the new northern Canadian fields, and the Patagonian guerrillas just may let the crop be harvested in order to gain local support and wreak economic havoc in the Chicago exchange. It’s all too much of a crapshoot. Stay away and wait for things to shake down.

—
Words from Wall Street

Ivan Josefovich Ligatski did not look like the fictional version of a typical Chekist thug out of the bad old days, usually portrayed as a burly balding brute in an ill-fitting blue suit, nor did he look like a fictional Party martinet, thin, ascetic, with old-fashioned wire-rimmed glasses and prim bloodless lips.

His suit was a rakish light gray and tailored well enough, he had curly medium-length black hair, an ordinary build, full lips, and rather large brown eyes unadorned by glasses.

But there was a full mustache above his lips, and while it was hardly one of the Stalin handlebars affected by Uncle Joe street hooligans, in place of a standard shirt and tie, he wore a stylized white peasant blouse with an off-white brocaded collar, and together they made the point, subtly perhaps, but unmistakably enough for Sonya’s heart to sink as she entered his office.

Ligatski was a Bear, and he didn’t care who knew it.

“Sit down please, Comrade Reed,” he said without rising from behind his desk. Using her American married name instead of calling her “Sonya Ivanovna” was another bad sign, and “Comrading” her did not seem designed to put her at her ease either. Or was she just becoming paranoid? Or was making her paranoid the intended effect in the first place?

Get ahold of yourself, Sonya
, she told herself as she sat down on the hard plastic chair in front of Ligatski’s standard-issue metal desk. You are the assistant director of the economic strategy department of Red Star, S.A., and, judging from his title and this office, you outrank this petty functionnaire, at least from a certain perspective.

The office had a window, but no real view, cheap beige carpeting, a computer terminal on the desk, no couch, no coffee table. There was, however, a rather fancy electrified antique samovar and tea service on a small banquette. And a color photo of Lenin. And good Lord, that was an
icon
sitting on top of the bookcase.

Ligatski did not offer tea, and that bit of boorishness certainly
was
significant, especially on the part of a neo-traditionalist like this.

“I will come directly to the point,” Ligatski said. “You have brought your Party card of course?”

“Of course,” Sonya said frostily. Assuming a low posture, as the Japanese would say, would do no good when dealing with a character like this.

“Let me have it.”

“What?”

“Have you been here so long that you can no longer understand a polite imperative construction in Russian?” Ligatski said archly. “I will try something less complex, then. Give me your Party card, Comrade Reed.”