Russian Spring (66 page)

Round and round it went in his head, and it did not revolve smoothly. There was a missing piece in all this, he didn’t know what it was, but he could feel it grinding painfully in his brain like a gear train with a missing tooth on a cogwheel. Something here just did not compute.

“I don’t know what to say, Patrice,” he finally said cautiously. “This is such a shock. . . . You’ve got to give me time to think. . . .”

“Naturellement,” Corneau said. “But unfortunately, we’re on a
tight timetable. In order to prevent confusion and weeks of political infighting, it has been decided to announce all three appointments simultaneously—Emile as Minister of Technological Development, me to replace him as Director, and a project manager to replace
me
. So nothing happens until we have a project manager to announce. I can let you sleep on it for two days, Jerry, but I’m afraid you’ll have to give me your answer before the weekend.”

Jerry staggered out of the project manager’s office and went straight home even though it was only four o’clock. He needed to be alone to think. But after hours of sitting on the hard black leather couch in his disheveled little living room, staring into space, he was as confused as ever.

Or worse. He had the eerie feeling that there was something lurking beneath the surface of all this that he didn’t understand. That perhaps he was simply unequipped to understand. Something churning around like a hidden serpent deep within the bowels of the deepest dirtiest levels of what he had always scorned as politique politicienne.

He desperately needed to talk this over with someone who understood these dirty bureaucratic games, someone who could tell him whatever it was that he sensed Corneau would not.

Velnikov? He was certainly a bureaucratic weasel, and he certainly had deep connections in Moscow. But of course he couldn’t talk to
Velnikov
about any of this!

He knew only one person in the world whom he could turn to for useful help now.

She had spent her whole life playing bureaucratic hardball. The Golden Boy was at least as well connected as Velnikov, and Red Star had real clout in Strasbourg too.

And she owed it to him, didn’t she? She owed him more than she could ever pay. She owed him his life back at the very least.

But how could he call Sonya? He hadn’t seen her in over a year. He hadn’t spoken to her on the phone for something like six months. And for over three years, their occasional phone conversations had been painful, and businesslike, and coldly brief. How could he face ripping open that deep old wound by crying out for her help now?

You’ll have to give up everything else to do it. . . .

Everything?

Even this?

Even this, kiddo, Rob Post’s voice seemed to whisper insinuatingly in his ear.

He poured himself a small Cognac, slugged it down, poured himself another, and without letting himself think any further about what he was doing, he sat down in the armchair in the videotel camera’s field
of vision and punched in the number of the apartment on Avenue Trudaine.

Sonya answered on the third ring. She was close to the camera. All he could see was her head and the collar of a plain white shirt. She looked older than he seemed to remember, it had been a year, but had she really looked as old as this? There were lines in her face where he had thought it would be smooth, and something different about the set of her mouth, and a severity to the ear-length cut of her hair. And her eyes seemed so world-weary and cynical.

He tried not to think about what
his
videotel camera must be showing
her
.

“Hello, Jerry,” she said, allowing only her raised eyebrows to show surprise.

“Hello, Sonya,” Jerry stammered. “Uh . . . how’ve you been doing?”

“Surviving,” she said coolly. “And you?”

“I need your advice, Sonya,” Jerry blurted. And, having spat it out and gotten directly to the point, “You owe me that much.”

“Of course I do,” she said with unexpected tenderness. “It was never my idea to drift apart.”

It was never
my
idea to divorce you!
Jerry was about to snap back.
Screwing Pashikov was never my idea either!

But the face on the screen had softened and let a sadness show through, and his heart would not let him say what his mind told him was presently entirely beside the point.

“It wasn’t either of our ideas, was it, Sonya?” he said instead. “Our lives just got ground up in the political machinery. There’s no point in blaming each other for it now, is there.”

“I’m glad you’ve finally come to that sad wisdom, Jerry,” Sonya said, and the professional bureaucrat’s mask went back up. “So tell me your problem, and I’ll gladly do whatever I can to help you.”

Perhaps that was for the best. At any rate, he found himself pouring out the story, not so much to the memory of his wife as to the mature detached professional bureaucrat on the screen, to the Director of the economic strategy department of the Paris office of Red Star, S.A.

Sonya’s face didn’t show anything as he told her of his cynical deal with Boris Velnikov, nor did she react to the news that Emile Lourade was becoming a Minister and Patrice Corneau was moving up to
ESA
Director. In her position, she probably had known it was coming before he had. But when he told her that Corneau had offered to put him up for project manager, her mouth fell open, and by the time he had finished, she was shaking with rage for some unfathomable reason.

“That’s loathsome!” she declared, her nose puckered up in an apparently sincere expression of disgust.

“Loathsome?” Jerry exclaimed. “What’s loathsome about trying to do the right thing?”

“Merde, Jerry, how can you be so naive? Patrice Corneau knows damn well he has absolutely no chance of being allowed to appoint you project manager! Don’t you see what’s really behind this?”

“No, I don’t,” Jerry said simply. “That’s why I had to call you.”

“Corneau is
using
you, Jerry,” Sonya said with angry passion. “Moscow badly wants Velnikov as project manager, and we have enough clout to veto whoever they put up until they break down and capitulate to end the deadlock. Our negotiators still come equipped with a good set of iron underpants. But if Corneau nominates you and refuses to put up anyone else until we withdraw Velnikov, it will be a clear signal that they’re serious, that the deadlock can only end with the appointment of a compromise. Once that happens, you may be sure that Moscow will demand your head on a platter for serving as Corneau’s dupe, and he’ll give it to them.”

Laid out as nakedly and angrily as all that, it had the instant ring of the disgusting bureaucratic truth. It was also, upon the briefest reflection, the only theory that accommodated all of the data.

“It’s fuck-your-buddy time, isn’t it?” he said.

“It’s always fuck-your-buddy time, Jerry, when are you going to face up to that? It’s the second law of bureaucracy.”

“Well, what the hell am I supposed to do?”

“Apply the first law of bureaucracy,” Sonya told him, “cover your ass.”

“How am I supposed to do that?”

Sonya’s face hardened, and when she spoke, it was the middle-aged survivor of the bureaucratic wars speaking, not his angry ex-wife, or the girl he had been enthralled by, or even the woman who had walked out on him to save her Party card.

“Give Corneau what he so richly deserves. Give Moscow what it wants.”

“What?”

“Let Corneau propose you for project manager. Let the process become good and deadlocked. Then you step aside in favor of Velnikov, in the interests of the project, European solidarity, world peace, and humanity’s future in space; don’t worry, Tass will write a stirring speech for the press release. They’ll have no choice, not when the Godfather of the Grand Tour Navette magnanimously steps aside and kisses Velnikov publicly on both cheeks.”

Jerry goggled at the hard-eyed mature woman on the screen. Was the woman he had married really capable of this?

Was he?

“And why should Velnikov live up to his end of the bargain?”
Jerry said, realizing as he said it that he had made the moral decision already.

“Because, despite what you think, Russians are not unprincipled swine whose word of honor is worthless!” Sonya snapped at him. Then, more coldly: “Besides which, Red Star will see to it that promises are kept. When the time comes for you to withdraw in favor of Velnikov, you will approach Moscow through Red Star, through me, they’ll certainly find that credible enough. And Ilya will transmit your offer directly to the Red Star Tower. And the Director General of Red Star himself will call President Gorchenko, who will order Tass to set up the public announcement. And all along the line, everyone will know what Velnikov promised you. Your ass will be plated with bureaucratic gold, Jerry. No one is going to sour such a triumph for Red Star on that level with a cheap double-cross if we have anything to say about it, and after we, not any government or Party apparatus, deliver Velnikov as project manager, believe me, we will!”

“And the Golden Boy will come out looking even more golden, won’t he?” Jerry muttered. And instantly regretted it. Sonya’s face seemed to grimace for just an instant, as if it was merely a glitch in the transmission, her eyes flared angrily at him for a longer moment, and then her expression became more distant, somehow, not so much cold as strangely wooden.

“His standing will certainly not be diminished,” she said evenly.

“And neither will yours, will it?” said Jerry. “You two are still . . . a team, aren’t you?”

“In a manner of speaking,” Sonya said tonelessly.

“What do you mean by that?”

“Let’s not get into that,” Sonya said wearily. “Can’t we just try and be friends?”

“I don’t think I can really be your friend after all that’s happened, Sonya,” Jerry told her. But he did let it be.

“I want to be your friend, Jerry, if you’ll let me,” Sonya said. “You came to me for help, remember . . . ? So at least let me give it to you. Don’t trust Patrice Corneau. Trust me.”

Jerry sighed. “I guess I really have no other choice,” he admitted. “But it certainly feels strange climbing into bed with all these goddamn Russians. . . .”

And then he nearly bit his tongue off when he saw the look on her face. Her mouth twisted into a snarl even as tears welled up in her eyes.

“I’m sorry, Sonya, it just came out.”

“I’m sorry too, Jerry, I’m sorry for a lot of things. So if we can’t really be friends, then just let me be your ally in this, okay?”

“Okay, Sonya,” Jerry said. He stared at her image on the screen
trying to think of something else to say, anything to end the conversation on anything but this oh-so-civilized level. But nothing would come.

Sonya stared back at him apparently just as blankly. “I’ll stay in touch, Jerry,” she finally said lamely.

“Yeah, you do that,” Jerry said, and they broke the connection.

Afterward, Jerry had just sat there in his tiny living room for a long while, staring at the dead screen, at the piles of journals spilling off the coffee table, at the science-fiction novels overflowing the bookcases and mounding up against the walls, at the clutter of chips and printouts surrounding the computer station, at the dust and the dirty glasses, at the physical evidence of what his life alone had become.

Somehow, something had made him clean up the entire apartment before collapsing that night, piling up the books and magazines as neatly as possible, straightening up the computer stand, changing the linen for the first time in two weeks, washing the mounds of dirty dishes, scrubbing the sink and stove, even making a pass at the bathtub and the toilet bowl.

That had been a long, long time ago, and he had never done anything like it since, but from that day on, he had never let things devolve to the point they had reached before. The living room had pretty much reverted to its primitive state, and the bedroom still had its pile of laundry, and the bedclothes were usually stale, but now, on the morning of the final static firing tests, the kitchen was at least bearable when he turned on the coffee machine, and the bathtub was more or less clean when he showered off the sweat of his workout.

The shaving mirror was more or less clean too, and the face in it, though the hair was now streaked with gray, and the skin a bit more than finely wrinkled, and the eyes hollowed by incipient bags, looked somehow younger today than it had before that call to Sonya, before Velnikov became project manager, before he became chief propulsion and maneuvering system engineer, before he had been able to look forward with concrete assurance to riding his Grand Tour Navette to the Moon. Older in years, in wrinkles, bags, gray hair, salt-and-pepper stubble, it was younger around the eyes and mouth, hopeful, and almost relaxed where it had been tense with frustration and bitter with ancient defeats.

By the time he had finished shaving and dressing, the coffee was ready, and he took a big mugful into the living room along with a somewhat stale pain au chocolat, and had his quick petit déjeuner sitting on the couch and thinking about today’s test.

The main engines were already certified and waiting on the pad atop a dumb freight rocket for tomorrow’s boost to orbit. All that
was left was routine static firing of assorted maneuvering system rockets, certainly nothing exciting in and of itself.

But then, once the rockets were certified, they would be taken down, and crated, and flown to Tyuratam, and boosted into orbit, and that would be the end of his work on the ground. Next stop—orbit, assembly, and then the Moon.

What his life would be like after his fifteen days in space was something he hadn’t really thought about until now. What do you do after you’ve finally walked on water? He was too old to seriously hope for any crew position when the fleet of Grand Tour Navettes became operational, too old to dream of exploring Mars, unqualified for anything in the bases on the Moon.

But after he had stepped aside for Boris Velnikov, things had changed for him at
ESA
. Patrice Corneau might have become distant and cold and certainly no longer his patron as Director of the Agency, but much to his ironic bemusement, Jerry had become rather the pet of the Russians.