Thirty minutes later, Stef emerged from the costume shop wearing acceptable clothes, short soft boots, baggy trousers, a faux astrakhan hat, a long warm padded jacket. In his pockets were thirty ten-ruble notes, the difference between the value of the handsome and practically new theatrical garb he’d sold the shop’s owner and that of the secondhand, ill-fitting stuff he’d bought from him.
He slipped into the crowd, which was denser than the center of Ulanor on Great Genghis Day. The street traffic was noisy and thick, everybody driving headlong as if their odd, smelly cars were assaulting a position. Above, the air traffic was thin, almost absent-a few primitive rotary-wing machines with shapes so bizarre that Stef thought at first that they were some sort of giant insect life. Jet trails streaked far above, making him wonder if airpackets already flew from Luna.
Between street and sky, strung on cables, hundreds of blue banners fluttered, all saying 1991-2091, and sometimes “100 Years of the Democratic Republic,” whatever that meant. He could see no mention of Tsar Stalin the Good.
His next stop was in front of a huge window filled with flickering mashini. Stef was surprised to see that the images made by the boxes were three-dimensional-he had expected something less advanced-though the technology was crude, merely a rough illusion created on a flat screen. His eyes roved past a ballet and half a dozen sports programs. Russianfutbol teams had dominated world play in the season just past, but what would the hockey season bring forth? Young people dashed around on grass or ice while the announcer talked.
Nobody at all seemed to be thinking about the danger of universal destruction. Stef shook his head, amazed at the ordinariness of this world, so close to its end. He moved along, jostling against these people who would soon be dust and ashes, astonished at their solidity and their obvious confidence that they would exist for a long time to come.
A single screen was tuned to a news program calledVremya and he stopped to watch it. A young woman wearing a fantastic pile of yellow hair spoke of the Russian-led international team now hard at work establishing the Martian colony and the problems it was facing. People on Mars, needing to communicate despite a babel of tongues, were developing a jargon all their own; the American members of the colony called it All-Speak. It was mostly Russian and English, with a flavoring of words from twenty other languages.
Meanwhile a new condominium development on Luna marked the transformation of that spartan base, barely seventy years old, into a genuine city, the first on another world. Space had never looked better;
Russia’s own program, after a long eclipse, again led the world. Here on Earth things were not so encouraging. There were new outbreaks of Blue Nile hemorrhagic fever. The Nine-Years’ War continued in the Rocky Mountains; the weak U.S. central government seemed unable to conquer the rebels, and United Nations peacekeepers had again been massacred in Montana.
But the big worry was that border tensions continued to mount in Mongolia, where Chinese forces had occupied Ulan Bator. The name cause Stef to press his nose against the glass. He had heard enough of Yang’s lecture to know that Ulan Bator was the origin of the name Ulanor, even though the city the announcer was talking about was now-now?-nothing more than a mound on the green forested banks of the River Tuul.
According to Yang, a few survivors of the Troubles had trekked northward, bringing the name with them and applying it to a cluster of yurts in an endless snowstorm. Later, because it had low background radiation, the place had become the site of the Worldcity-a strange fate for a Mongol encampment that had survived the Two Year Winter for no better reason than the sheer unkillable toughness of its people and an endless supply of frozen yak meat, which they had softened by sleeping on it and eaten raw for lack of firewood.
Another name caught Stef’s attention. “Defense Minister Razumovsky has declared that Russia, together with its European and American allies, will stand firm against further aggression by the Imperial People’s Republic of China.”
Defense Minister Razumovsky? That wasn’t the word he had learned, the name of the man Dyeva was supposed to kill. It was another Raz word, Raz, raz-Razruzhenye.
He must have said the word aloud without meaning to, for his translator murmured, “Destruction.”
Stef nodded. Sure. In the folk memory, Minister Razumovsky became Minister Razruzhenye, Minister Destruction. The name was wrong, but the tradition might still be correct.
Razumovsky suddenly appeared in a clip. He had a wide, flat face like a frog someone had stepped on.
He seemed to talk with his right fist as much as his mouth, pounding on a podium while he spoke of Russia’s sacred borders and of China’s presumption, now that it had conquered Korea and Japan, that all East Asia belonged to the Dragon Republic.
“They’ll find out different if they mess with us!” Razumovsky bawled, and loud cheering broke out among a crowd seated in something called the Duma. “They think they can threaten us with their rockets, but our Automated Space Defense System is the most advanced in the world. I spit upon their threats!” More cheering.
Then a weighty, white-maned man came on, identified as President Rostoff. His message was of conciliation and peace. “As the leader of the Western Alliance, Russia bears a grave responsibility to act with all due caution. Our guard is up, but we extend as well the hand of friendship to our Chinese brothers and sisters.”
Stef smiled; across the centuries, he recognized without difficulty the ancient game of good cop-bad cop.
He moved on, meditating on a final line from the announcer: that the debate on the Mongolian situation would continue in the Duma tonight, and that the President and the cabinet would again be present. Was that why Dyeva had picked this particular day to return to the past?
He walked down a gentle declivity where the street widened into an avenue called Great Polyanka and rose to the marble pylons of a new gleaming bridge. Beyond a small river he saw red walls, gold onion domes, palaces of white stone-the Kremlin.
Pleasure boats with glass roofs slid lazily along the river, which was divided here by a long island. In the boats Stef could see brightly dressed people dancing. Then the crowd swept him onto the other bank, past the Aleksandrovsky Gardens and up a gentle rise. Here the throng divided; most people passed on, but some joined a long queue that had formed at a brick gatehouse.
Stef continued with the majority along the autumnal garden and the crenellated wall into Red Square. He stared like any tourist at a cathedral like a kif-head’s dream and then, feeling tired and hungry, crossed the square and drifted into the archways of a huge building that filled the far side, a market of some sort crowded with shops and loudly bargaining people. At a stall that sold writing paper, Stef bought a small notebook, an envelope, and an object he had never seen before-a pen that emitted ink.
The building held eating places, too. Hungrily, Stef found himself a place at a small table in one of them and orderedshchi without knowing what cabbage was. Soon a bowl of hot greenish soup lay steaming before him, along with a sliced onion and a chunk of dense and delicious brown bread and sweet butter.
It was the first time he’d ever tasted butter from a cow, since all the Earth’s cattle had died in the Troubles. It had a subtle, complex flavor and an unctuous texture quite different from the manufactured stuff he knew.
He devoured it all, licked his fingers as the other diners were doing, and paid with a few of his rubles.
Then, still sitting at the table, he laboriously wrote a few lines, tore out the page, and sealed it in an envelope which he addressed to Xian in care of Yama. He left the eating place smiling grimly; in case something went wrong, this note was another legacy he hoped to leave behind him.
He returned to Red Square to find that in his absence it had become almost unbearably beautiful. A light autumn snow had begun to fall, streetlights were coming on, and the bizarre cathedral of St. Basil floated in its own illumination, more than ever a dream.
Shadows, light and snow turned everything to magic. Strolling past were young people with faces as white and pink as dawn clouds, and among them stout men in astrakahns and elegant women in faux ermine. Old women were selling apples that could have been plucked from their own cheeks.
A little band began to play somewhere as Stef slowly retraced his steps, out of the square and up to a floodlit gate in the Kremlin wall. People were streaming in, all talking excitedly, and Stef followed.
Inside, he moved with difficulty through the throng gathering at a big, anonymous new building with the words DUMA OF THE RUSSIAN PEOPLE in gold letters above the doors. Guards in hats of faux fur were trying to keep a roadway open here, pushing people back but, to Stef’s surprise, using no whips.
Considering what he had always heard about the Tsars, the mildness of this government was astonishing.
He circled the crowd, his mind now centered on Dyeva’s hologram, searching faces of which there seemed no end, countless faces, all different, none hers.
