Russian Spring (75 page)

“He knew just what he was doing,” many Eurorussian delegates charged afterward. “It was a clear attempt to incite chauvinistic outrage between Russians and Ethnic Nationalists, and it certainly succeeded.”

—Novosti

“He’s been living on the phone, Franja, he’s got them all roped into this crazy scheme,” Mother said. “I don’t know how to stop it, I don’t know what to tell him, I’m at my wits’ end.”

It had been five days since Franja had been able to get back to Paris, and during that time Father would seem to have been as busy as the maniacs in the Ukraine. The last time she had been home, all this had seemed like a harmless fantasy, indeed Mother herself had even been more or less encouraging it as a way to keep his spirits up, and Father had certainly seemed like his old space-obsessed self, minus the bitterness, and the anti-Soviet tirades.

He had babbled about it endlessly during every meal, and Mother had just sat there, and smiled, and let him rave on.

The shakedown cruise of the first Grand Tour Navette had been such a complete success that they were already starting to boost components into orbit with which to assemble the second. The news coverage had been extensive, it had been the ideal diversion from the impending crisis in the Ukraine, and there had even been a rather long feature interview with the Father of the Grand Tour Navette that had been carried on
Vremya
.

Franja had caught it back home in Moscow. Ivan was in town at the same time for once, and he had been complaining of late that she had hardly spent any time at all with him since her father’s accident, taking off-days in Paris she could have spent in Moscow with him. He had actually started to act
jealous
of the attention she was lavishing on her invalid father—at his expense, or so at least Ivan seemed to be beginning to see it. So she had made sure they watched the interview together, hoping that it would somehow make him understand, smooth the troubled waters.

And it had.

Ivan had fidgeted and cursed under his breath during the inevitable lead story on the Ukrainian election, but when Jerry Reed’s image appeared on the videowall—a full establishing shot of Father sitting on the living room couch with the hibernautika console conspicuously in evidence—his broad strong face had softened, the frown lines smoothed out, and he had taken her hand and squeezed it.

The interview itself had been rather a tearjerker, with the English
interviewer spinning out an elaborate and overcomplex metaphor comparing Father to Moses looking down from afar, after forty years of wandering in the wilderness, upon the Promised Land he was destined never to see, intercut with images of the Grand Tour Navette orbiting the Earth, approaching the Moon, the triumphant return.

The interviewer had tried to squeeze the maximum bathos out of Father’s present condition, but Father, smiling rather dreamily and bravely, seemed to be fighting her every inch of the way, going on about the wonderful Soviet device that was keeping him alive, how fitting it was that it was a piece of space-program spin-off, how symbolic it was of the transnational spirit of the European Space Agency, how grateful he was to have played a part in this epic moment of human history, almost as if Tass had written his lines for him.

“I hope those bastards in the Ukraine are watching this!” Ivan said. “An
American
going on like this about transnational solidarity! But you always told me that your father
loathed
the Soviet Union . . . ?”

Franja couldn’t understand it either. “He always used to,” she said. “I guess it took a hard hit on the head to bring him to his senses.”

“Hmmm . . . I wish Gorchenko had the balls to apply the same therapy to the blockheads in Kiev. . . .”

“And finally, what do you see for the future, Mr. Reed?” the interviewer said, as the camera moved in for a concluding close-up on Father.

But Father had not taken the opportunity to present his vision of mankind’s destiny as a space-going species. Instead, he had stared directly and dreamy-eyed into the camera, and smiled a sad little, brave little, quite heartrending smile.

“This marvelous Soviet device that has been keeping me alive was developed to enable cosmonauts to someday go to the stars in a state of hibernation,” Father had said instead. “So there’s really no reason why it can’t enable
me
to go as far as Spaceville, or the Moon. So what I see for the future is not a Moses forever barred from his Promised Land, but myself, up there on a Grand Tour Navette, on my way to the Moon. As just a tourist, maybe, but getting there just the same. And if there are those who say that’s an impossible dream, well, that’s what they were saying about the Grand Tour Navette twenty years ago, wasn’t it? We live in the golden age of space travel. Formerly impossible things are happening every day.”

“And you told me that your father couldn’t cope with politics?” Ivan had said softly. “If it was a question of a popular vote, he’d be on his way now. What a man! You are
sure
he’s an American? He has the heart of a true Russian!”

On Franja’s next trip back to Paris, Father had been bubbling with enthusiasm, totally absorbed in his hopeless fantasy, going on and on
about the letters he was receiving from all over Europe, about how, after all, Spaceville was full of retirees in far worse shape than he was, about how it was his
right
to ride the Grand Tour Navette.

And Mother, for her part, had kept up her smiling front and just let him go on, encouraging him even. Only when she was alone with Franja did she let her heartache show through.

For of course the whole thing was out of the question. Even if there was some way to persuade the European Space Agency to give him his Grand Tour Navette ride, the strain of a Concordski boost to orbit, if it didn’t kill him, would accelerate the accumulated brain and lung and blood-vessel damage he was already suffering. He wouldn’t even be allowed aboard a short-hop airplane; the cabin pressure changes would be too much for the hibernautika to properly handle, and no commercial carrier’s insurance would cover him.

“But why do you encourage him then, Mother?” Franja had asked.

And Mother had shrugged and sighed. “It keeps his spirits up. It’s like his own little science-fiction story. I think he really knows it’s impossible himself, but . . . What am I supposed to tell him, anyway? The truth? That he’s dying? That it’s breaking my heart twice over to hear him go on like this . . . ?”

And she had broken into tears then, and collapsed into Franja’s arms, sobbing. But by breakfast the next morning, she was all smiles and enthusiasm again when Father displayed the latest packet of letters. And so the visit had gone.

But that was then, and this was now.

By now, so it seemed, Father had been busy putting pressure, moral and otherwise, on his friends and colleagues at
ESA
. All during dinner, he had gone on and on about what he had already accomplished.

Patrice Corneau, at least to hear Father tell it, had agreed to let him ride the second Grand Tour Navette on its shakedown cruise as an “honorary observer,” provided that he was authorized to do so by a resolution of the Common European Parliament. Emile Lourade had agreed to endorse such a resolution, provided it was introduced by the government of a member state. Boris Velnikov had promised to take the matter up with his nebulous contacts in Moscow.

Mother had kept up her smiling façade throughout all this, but Franja could see how plastic it was, and now Mother for the most part kept her silence. She seemed drawn, and wan, and vibrating with unreleased tension, and toward the end, over dessert, she even slipped to the point where a certain anger had shown through.

“Of course I doubt if Velnikov is as connected as he likes to pretend,” Father had said. “He’s got some real influence, but it would certainly help if there was some pressure from the Red Star Tower—”

“I’ve told you a hundred times, Jerry, Red Star has no influence on—”

“—but it has plenty of influence with the contractors, and the contractors—”

“Have nothing to do with government policy!”

“But Tass does, and the Paris bureau would love a story like this, wouldn’t they, what with—”

“The tail does not wag the dog!”

“But
Red Star
is one big dog, and you’re the Director of the Paris office! You’re an important bureaucrat here, Sonya, there have got to be other important bureaucrats who want favors from you, you can trade them back and forth till you get a Foreign Ministry stamp on a request from Velnikov, and then—”

“It just doesn’t work that way, Jerry!”

“You can at least try!”

“I told you, I
am
trying! But I simply can’t promise you the results you want! It’s no easy matter for the Director of Red Star’s Paris office to commandeer the services of the central governmental apparatus!”

“I’m not asking you to do anything like that!”

And Mother had taken a deep breath, and calmed herself, and spoken in a much more soothing tone of voice. “Yes you are, Jerry,” she said softly. “And I really am trying. Just please, please, don’t expect me to work miracles overnight.”

“Impossible things are happening every day,” Father had said more quietly, and Mother had nodded, and smiled, and the moment had seemed to finally glide past.

But after Father had gone to bed, Mother had taken Franja into the living room, and poured them both Cognacs, and let her anguish and her ire come out.

“I don’t know what to do, Franja, they’re all encouraging him shamelessly—Velnikov, Corneau, Lourade—they’re all just telling him whatever they think he wants to hear.”

“But don’t they know, Mother, about . . . I mean . . . ?”

“Of course they do!” Mother snapped angrily. “They’re all just stringing him along and passing the responsibility for saying no to someone else! Corneau tells him, of course, all I need is a resolution of the Common European Parliament. Lourade tells him, sure, I’ll back the resolution as soon as a member state introduces it. Velnikov says, sure, I’m on your side, but my connections in Moscow. . . It’s the oldest bureaucratic game in the book. No one wants to say no, no one can say yes, so they just toss the responsibility back and forth until it gets caught by someone who has no one to pass it along to.”

Mother sighed, took a long sip of Cognac. “And the way the
cowards have set it up, at least in Jerry’s eyes,” she said, “that’s me.”

Franja took a sip of Cognac herself. As Mother had asked, she had tried to be a real daughter to her father. There had been no further recriminations about the past. She had been cordial, she had been friendly, she had been sympathetic. At first, it had been something of an act, playing the role of dutiful daughter to a father who had betrayed her. But Father had been cordial too, gentle, wistful, and what had begun as a favor to her mother had perhaps slowly transmuted into the real thing.

For this was a different man from the father who had disowned her, and perhaps it had been Ivan who had shown her the truth of that. “What a man!” Ivan had declared. “He has the heart of a true Russian!”

And so he did, Franja admitted to herself now. Like a true Russian, her father was a dreamer, a romantic, a brave spirit who defied the fates, who was ready to dare anything to fulfill what he saw as his destiny, even in the face of death. How could she deny her love to such a man?

And for the first time in many a year, she found herself thinking of her old lost love, Nikolai Smirnov, out there somewhere now beyond Mars. Nikolai would understand what she felt even better than Ivan.

Nikolai would understand why now, at long, long last, she felt so proud to be the daughter of Jerry Reed.

“Perhaps . . . perhaps you should do what Father asks?” Franja said. “You could, couldn’t you?”

“Do what?” Mother said. “Help him kill himself?”

And Franja saw her mother for the first time through different eyes. Saw a woman quite different from herself, a woman who would never understand what she and her father shared. “To write his own happy ending,” she said.

“Franja!” Mother cried. “What
are
you saying?”

“Nothing, Mother,” Franja said, staring down into her glass.

Perhaps you have lived in the West far too long, she thought.

Perhaps you have forgotten what it means to have a Russian heart.

KRONKOL BY A LANDSLIDE

Final election returns from the Ukraine show that Vadim Kronkol has captured 69 percent of the Presidential vote. The Ukrainian Liberation Front has won 221 seats in the 302-seat Ukrainian Parliament.

President Harry B. Carson, on behalf of the American people, has congratulated Mr. Kronkol on his smashing victory, referring to the
Ukrainian leader as “a fellow freedom fighter” and the “George Washington of his country.”

The American Vice President, Nathan Wolfowitz, an avowed political enemy of President Carson who was put on the Republican ticket by desperate party leaders in what both men freely admit was a pragmatic deal to break the long convention deadlock, was quick as usual to distance himself from the head of his own government.

“That grinding noise you hear is the Father of Our Country gnashing his wooden choppers in the grave,” the Vice President declared. “What scares me is the thought that he’s going to have a lot more new company if Harry Carson keeps shooting his mouth off without thinking, like the flannel-mouthed demagogue he is.”

—
The Times
(London)

It was all so frustrating, so near, and yet so far. He had convinced Patrice Corneau to see things his way, he had convinced Emile Lourade, he had even convinced his old enemy Velnikov; why couldn’t he convince his own wife?

Sonya, for all her talk, was really doing nothing. She was treating him like an invalid, like a piece of fragile glasswork to be kept in cotton batting, something to be carefully preserved against all possibility of risk.

Not that Jerry couldn’t understand why. The doctors had led her to believe that if he was careful, if he took good care of himself, if he took no risks, he could survive indefinitely like this, or at least long enough for a brain transplant or an electronic implant to become possible.