Russian Spring (30 page)

For Bobby, despite Father’s ardent wishes, refused to become the little space cadet that Father longed for. The little ingrate blew it.

When she was about twelve, and had learned enough from Mother about the art of bureaucratic manipulation to take matters into her own hands, and even Father had begun to face the fact that his efforts with Bobby were hopeless, she began to ask her father questions about space. Intelligent questions. Questions she studied to prepare and framed carefully. Questions designed to pique his attention, to show him that he at least had a
daughter
to pass the torch along to.

“Do you think the Barnards have starships, Father?” she asked him one day. “Do you think they might mount an expedition when they get our message?”

Father looked at her peculiarly. “Starships?” he muttered.

“It would seem that there are artifacts scattered throughout the Barnard system, large ones too, as if they’ve built something like the old O’Neil colonies. Wouldn’t that imply the technology to take the next step? A generation ship expedition, or at least an automated probe?”

Father got a distracted faraway look in his eyes, the one Mother called his outer-space stare. “We’ll both be gone before anyone knows the answer to that,” he muttered.

“Maybe not. Maybe they’ll answer our message. If they do, I’ll still be around to hear it. And if they
do
answer, by that time, won’t
we
be ready to mount an expedition to
them?
”

“You’re probably right,” Father said. “They do seem to have occupied more of their solar system than we have, and we probably could mount an expedition thirty or forty years from now.”

“With a little luck, we could both live to see it!”

Father laughed. “I’m afraid I’d need a lot more than a little luck to last that long,” he said. “But you, Franja . . .”

He had looked at her with new eyes then, with a new awareness; he was deep into his outer-space stare, but now it was focused intently
on
her
for the first time. She could feel things shifting. She could feel the world changing.

“You, Franja . . . ,” he said again.

“Me, Father,” Franja said softly, outer-space staring back at him, measure for measure.

And after that, it was Franja who got the telescope, Franja whom Father encouraged to pursue a career in space, Franja to whom Father poured out what Mother called his space babble, father and daughter who found each other through a shared vision.

“We’re like the ancient Polynesians sailing our first little outrigger canoes from island to island across the unknown Pacific,” Father told her. “And one day one of our tiny little boats is going to sail into the harbor of some galactic city a million years of evolution grander than anything we could have dreamed. And you could be on it.”

Franja believed that, she really did. She did more than believe it. She set it up before her as the shining goal of her lifetime, and she worked to fulfill it. She studied hard. She became something of a grind. She watched her nutrition carefully and kept herself in shape with long hours of swimming, which also, she had heard, was the best exercise to prepare her reflexes for zero-gravity locomotion.

She was going to get there. She was going to be a cosmonaut. She would do what she had to to get into Yuri Gagarin, the only real space academy in the world, where Russians who had been to the Moon and Mars trained what was by far the largest cosmonaut cadre in the world.

But when she finally proudly told Father of her intentions, she was stunned by his reaction.

“You don’t want to go to Yuri Gagarin,” he told her. “You don’t want to end up stuck in the Soviet program. Not when
ESA
is someday going to open up the whole solar system with my Grand Tour Navettes.
ESA
’s the place for you, Franja, where I can help you, where someday you can go to Mars on a ship that I built. Won’t that be something? Who knows, I might even get to ride along.”

What could she say to that? Certainly not the bitter truth, she knew even then.

“But Father,” she told him instead, “Soviet cosmonauts are going to Mars already! Who knows when
ESA
will really build Grand Tour Navettes? It’s the Soviet Union that has the
real
space program. Tell the truth, Dad, if you could, wouldn’t
you
become a Soviet cosmonaut right now?”

But Father refused to believe that the Soviet space program had been a visionary one from the start, as far back as Tsiolkovsky’s dreams of exploring the solar system and Yuri Gagarin himself, a thing of the romantic Russian heart.

The Americans had gone to the Moon for political prestige, and then their space program degenerated into a militarist nightmare. Common Europe could think of nothing grander to do than expend all its energies on building a glorified
resort hotel
for senile plutocrats. The Japanese cared for nothing but orbital factories and power stations.

But the Soviet Union had had a vision all along. Why couldn’t Father see that it was his vision too? Of exploring for life on Mars, or on Titan, or even in the superheated sea beneath the Uranian ice. Of eventually extending the search to the stars. And of building in the meantime a solar system–wide civilization that would be worthy of sailing its canoes into the galactic main as equals.

Why couldn’t Father accept that as good enough reason to go to Yuri Gagarin and not tempt her to cruelty?

Surely Father knew the bitter truth that Mother had explained to her in words of many painful syllables. Surely Franja could have won this argument once and for all by forcing him to acknowledge it.

Surely she could never do it, no matter how frustrated with him she became, no matter how sorely she was tempted.

How could she tell her own father that being his daughter would be the political kiss of death to her at
ESA
?

She couldn’t. She didn’t. She couldn’t stoop to winning the endless argument with that any more than she could rid herself of her American family name by calling herself Franja Gagarin at the cost of what was left of her father’s pride.

Not that she exactly made a point of using her family name these days, either. An American name did not exactly endear anyone to the powers that be in the French educational system, nor was it worth the risk to be caught lying about her father being English when his name appeared in the back pages of the newspapers at unpredictable intervals.

At school, she was Jerry Reed’s daughter, and she was stuck with it, and if that meant a certain pointed pronunciation of her name from time to time, she had to admit that there were also times when it was a badge of honor.

But when it came to her social life, what there was of it, being Franja Reed was quite another matter.

Franja was a good Russian name, and it was a fine thing to be young and Russian and in Paris. Not only was the Soviet Union greatly admired, Paris was embracing styles and trends and things Russian, and the French were eager to embrace what Russians they could find, in every sense of the word.

The sons and daughters of Embassy staff and Red Star personnel who formed the core of her small circle of friends joked about it
among themselves, and made a wry point of doing so in thick Russified French, but that didn’t stop any of them from dressing up in stylized cossack gear and playing the second coming of the Red Menace for appreciative French audiences.

Oh yes, it was fun being a Russian named Franja in Paris!

Being an American named Reed was something else again.

There were boys who eyed her from afar, only to flee in the other direction when they learned her full name. There were self-styled men of the world who professed not to care until their parents forced them to end it. There were cretins of both sexes forever trying to force her into the position of actually defending the loathsome policies of the United States so they could vent their wrath upon a convenient target.

The old Russian solution would be to substitute the patronymic whenever possible, but “Franja Jerryovna” was hardly an option.

It was the rising tide of socialist feminism that rolled in with a
modern
Russian solution.

In the Soviet Union, a fashion arose among the enlightened youth of the Russian Spring for giving yourself a new patronymic of your own choosing; as a declaration of generational perestroika if you were a socialist feminist chafing under the linguistic yoke of tired old Slavic phallocracy, and if you knew what was good for you when paying court to same, even if you were a hairy unreconstructed phallocrat among the boys.

One chose the name of someone one admired, someone famous, someone you were telling the world you wished to emulate. For Franja, of course, the choice of a pop patronymic was obvious and perfect.

Who could deny that Yuri Gagarin was a worthy exemplar of socialist virtue and Russian pride? Who better personified everything she wished to become?

So she chose to call herself “Franja Yurievna Gagarin Reed,” “Franja Yurievna” period, when she could manage, and if there were those who called her “Franja Yurievna Gagarin” let them make of it what they would, and preferably to her advantage; she did not encourage it, now did she, and she had never used anything but her full legal name on any document.

Including the application for admission to the Yuri Gagarin Space Academy.

And there it was in full, “Franja Gagarin Reed” all over the admission forms that had arrived in the mail this morning.

Not that she could have hidden behind any pop patronymic with the Yuri Gagarin Space Academy. Jerry Reed might be an American, but he was still her father, and under Soviet law, she could no more attend Yuri Gagarin without her father’s written consent than she
could claim her Soviet citizenship without it until she reached her legal majority.

And Father, who had every reason to want to sign these papers, who had encouraged her career so strongly, who wanted so much to see his daughter go where he could not, was being manipulated by Bobby into withholding his permission until Mother agreed that her brother could go to college in his beloved America.

As far as Franja was concerned, ruining his life by getting a third-rate education in a country that was loathed by the civilized world would only be what Bobby deserved. Let them draft him into their Foreign Legion and ship him to some Latin American jungle if that’s what he wanted.

But with all the scruples and honor of the devious paranoiacs in Washington who were trying to sabotage the Soviet entry into Common Europe, Machiavellian little Bobby had weaseled himself into a position where he held her admission to the Soviet space academy hostage.

If she had a right to go to Yuri Gagarin in the Soviet Union, then he had a right to go to college in America. That was the way Bobby saw it, and that was the way he had manipulated Father into seeing it.

Father would never pretend to be balking at letting her go to Gagarin if Bobby hadn’t persuaded him that linking the issues was the only way to persuade Mother to let Bobby go to America.

What Father would really do if Mother called his bluff, Franja didn’t want to think about.

“Dinner is ready,” Mother’s voice called from the kitchen.

Franja grimaced, and not just because Father and Mother had been in the kitchen together by themselves since they came home, which usually meant a private argument and a truly revolting concoction on the table, for she had the feeling that the dinner conversation was likely to be even more unpalatable than the battleground cuisine.

When Franja walked down the long hallway past Bobby’s room, the door was ajar and the room was empty. Just like him to make sure he got there first, as if . . . as if he had sneaked a look in the mailbox this morning before she got there and seen the packet from Moscow.

And indeed, he was already seated at the dining table when she arrived, greeting her with a fatuous smile and knowing eyes that told her that was exactly what he had done.

It was not like Jerry Reed to come staggering home from work drunk like some nikulturni muzhik, so Sonya did not have to be a Pavlov
Institute psychic to guess that his meeting with Emile Lourade had not exactly been a triumph.

She was in the kitchen cutting up the beef when he arrived and plunked down a bottle of some dreadful-looking Barolo on the long wooden counter under the window, his acumen clearly adversely affected by what he had already drunk before purchasing it at some Felix Potin instead of their regular caviste.

“Somehow I sense that the news was not exactly good, Jerry?” she said as he began cutting onions off the string beside the spice rack with a paring knife as if this were the most normal day in the world.

“Well, as the famous old American saying goes, there’s good news and bad news,” Jerry said sardonically, angrily slicing off the ends of onions as if they were the heads of enemies. “The good news is that the Director of the European Space Agency had a few drinks at the corner brasserie after work with the newly appointed project manager of the newly funded Grand Tour Navette Project. . . .”

“Why that’s marvelous, Jerry!” Sonya exclaimed, and moved down the countertop to give him a hug.

“The bad news is that I was there too,” Jerry told her, freezing her in her tracks. “Does that answer your question?”

“La merde, Jerry, what
happened?
”

As Jerry stood there cutting up onions and spitting it all out through the sniffles and tears, the dreadful realization came over her that she was in the process of acquiring precisely the information that Ilya Pashikov was after for the Space Ministry without having decided whether she wanted it.

Knowing what Emile Lourade had cooked up now would probably allow the Space Ministry to hammer out a deal on a combined space budget about 10 percent better than what they’d get if Lourade controlled the timing of its revelation to them.

What had been done to Jerry was appalling, though in retrospect hardly surprising. But what was somehow at least as appalling was the
pettiness
of the moral quandary she had now been put in.