“It says ‘Astrodyne Systems MOREL 2’.”
“An American ship.”
“I have friends in America. I send them mine, they send me theirs. We’re all the same, really.”
“They didn’t get there either.”
“No, they left it too late. Do you know what they ask for most? The Americans?” He nodded Yuri to the disk of embroidered fabric, insignificant among the prints and plans of the boosters and orbiters. Vorontsev, Nitin, Rozdevshensky, Selkokari: Novy Mir. And the date, so many decades ago he could not believe the hubris of those who had planned to send men to another world. Another Russia, then. “I’ll never let them have it. A photograph, that’s what they’ll get. At least we made it to the pad.”
The hatch-dog spinning. The gloved hand reaching in: the thick, black glove. The glove, the hand that should not have been there. The gold-plated audio jacks pulling free from the helmet sockets, dangling on their glossy black wire coils. Commander Rozdevshensky hitting his chest release and surging up from his restraint straps- slowly, so slowly-as the white digits on the countdown timer remained forever frozen between the flip and flop. Better to die that way. Better by far than to be talked to death by pragmatists and right Christians.
And it still hurt, by God, still brought that involuntary twitch to the corners of the mouth. Thirty-five years since the light of a Kazakhstan morning flooded through the hatch into the capsule, the hatch that should have opened on another light altogether. Scrap now. Plumbing in the Presidential palaces of new Republics. Pig sheds. He had heard that one of the preignition pumps had turned up as a vodka still. New Russia. Dismembered. But in this shrine to a lost space age deep in Baltic winter, ATOM 12 still stood as he remembered her that morning as they drove across the steppe, high and lovely and unbelievably white. Its model in the corner by the curtained window towered over Yuri. Towers over us all, his grandfather thought. We are never out of its shadow, the rocket that would have taken Antti Selkokari, Cosmonaut, to Mars.
The holy woman has been in the tomb five days now and the crowds are gathering again. Most are there to witness a miracle, a triumph of faith and will. They are easy to spot: many wear the sadhu’s unbraided hair and go flagrantly naked, skin daubed with holy ash. Spirit clad. Some practice asceticism; burning cones of incense on their skin, driving hooks through folds of flesh, tongue, eyelids. One man walks around for the admiration of the crowd, his right arm held aloft by a devotee declaring that the sadhu had held his arm fifteen years thus in asceticism. Fifteen years! The arm is withered as a stick in a drought. It will never bend again. The joints are fused, locked. The holy man’s eyes glare spiritual challenge at the crowds thronging the station approach. See what I do: who in this corrupt century dares attempt such practice to sever soul from flesh?
This corrupt century has surer and swifter ways to samadhi, Ashwin thinks, smiling to himself, as he joins the queue for holy breakfast. He has done this every morning since the sacred woman’s coffin was sealed, lowered into the dusty grave, and buried. Behind him, a band tootles. Off-shift jitneys and money-kids on bio-motor scooters dart around the musicians. The sky is already that flat, dusty steel blue of the most ferociously hot days; the sun a savage copper atom. Ashwin thanks whatever gods mind buried women for the air-conditioning of the cyber- mahals of Chandigarh. The line shuffles forward, toward the shade of the tent where Ashwin can make out the bobbing, nodding head of the benefactor; a datarajah: grown sleek on the global market’s hunger for cheap IT labor. His expiation: a pile of chapattis and a pot of daal.
Ashwin reaches the folding deal table where the alms are bestowed. The old man bows to him in blessing, an assistant hands him a chapati. Ashwin cannot but notice the barrier gloves. He looks a moment at the bowed head of the rich man, the saffron mark on the forehead, the simple white robes. Are you the one whose machines split my mind from my body and send it across the solar system? A nudge moves him on.
“How long?” Ashwin asks the man at the end of the row of tables, whose job seems to be to keep the beneficiaries moving. He nods to the richly patterned cloth draped over the pile.
“Looking like today,” the minder says.
By the time Ashwin reaches the station, he has finished the holy breakfast. With each step up, the sound from within increases until it seems as solid as the four-hundred-year-old Raj-brick walls. Hand-scrawled signs apologize again for the delay in final construction of the nano-carbon diamond train shed. Labor shortages. More money to be made, out there. The spars of the half-completed dome reach over the crumbling station like a hunting hawk’s claws, stooping. Beneath them, legions of shift workers clash on the platforms, merge, flow through each, separate, neither the victor. Clocking on, clocking off. Families camped on the platforms make meals, wipe children, tend elders. Water sellers clack bronze water cups, newsplug hawkers hold up five fingers full of the days’ headlines; wallahs lift baskets of guavas and mangoes; battered tin trays of samosas and nimki; paper-wrapped pokes of channa. Buy eat buy eat. Ashwin half-hears an announcement, half-glimpses a platform change on a hovering roll- screen, then is almost carried off his feet as a thousand people move as one. Out there, a sleek little electric commuter train slides stealthily into its platform. He makes it as the doors close, dodges the Sikh packer who would seize him by collar and seat of pants and wedge him between that oily man with the big mustache and that girl in the suddenly self-consciously short skirt. Ashwin swings into the gap between carriages: hands reach down, pull him up the ladder as the fast little train begins to accelerate.
The inside monthly ticket has gone up again.
Roof-riders shuffle aside for Ashwin as the train pulls out of the cracked dome of Kharar station. He grips tight as the carriage lurches over points. If you slide down between the carriages, there is no hope. But it is cheap, and the air is fresher than the hot spew pushed around by the carriage ventilators. From his high seat, it seems to Ashwin that even in one night the slum chawls have divided and grown denser again, like bacteria doubling, in a sample dish. They seem to shoulder closer to the line. Chawl life as a series of snapshots. Flash: a dirty little urchin girl, wide-eyed at the wonderful train, one hand in her mouth, the other held up in salutation. Hello hello hello… Flash: three men in dhotis drag the corpse of a pickup on frayed nylon ropes, like an ox hauled to the slaughter. Flash: two barefoot women push a water-barrow, leaning hard into the shafts to shift the heavy leaking plastic barrel. Flash: a leathery old man angles a solar umbrella into the best light to power his sewing machine. Flash: A skeletal yellow cow stares dully at the level crossing, unfazed by the train hurtling past its nose. Don’t test your sacred status this morning. Panjab Rapid Transit respects you not.
Ashwin thinks of his own tenaciously held few rooms, the roof garden where his mother tends a small urban farm, the balcony; his father’s pride, the mark of a man, a place where he may entertain his friends, read the paper of a morning, watch the satellite sports of an evening. But a proper house; no slum, no cardboard shanty, no. So proud they are. He thinks of the world he will build that day, the homes and towns they will design beneath the glass sky. Cities. Hundreds of cities; cities built for people, with districts where everyone knows your name and open spaces where you can meet and talk and markets where you can buy goods from two worlds and then a cup of coffee in a bar where you may watch sports. Cities big enough to be thrilling, small enough to be intimate. And chawls? Ashwin looks at the sprawling degradation with a new eye. Yes, chawls! Of course chawls! Where there are people, there will always be the cities we build for ourselves, out of our deepest needs, not given by those who tell us how we should live. Human cities. He imagines the people of Old Kharar and Basi and Kurali flocking from their hovels, along the sewage-seeping lanes to the roads, to the rail, south, ever south, to the girdle of space elevators ringing the world’s waist. He sees them flowing up those spun-diamond towers, sailing across space in colossal arks, whole families together. He imagines them coming down the hundred thousand pier-towers, spreading out under his glass roof across the virgin grasslands, taking the things they find and building from them their homes.
A sudden slam of sound and air and movement jars him out of his dreams. Ashwin slides on his tender perch, grabs, finds human bodies. Hands seize him, steady him. The 07:00 Jullundur express hurtles past on the main line, a blurred streak of steel and windows and speed. Ashwin laughs. And trains. Of course trains. The only practical transport. No plane can operate in the cold, primeval atmosphere beyond the roof, and none but a fool or a sparrow would fly inside a glass house. Trains, then. Already, he has heard, engineers are designing fusion-powered juggernauts the size of city blocks riding tracks wide as a house. Grand journeys they shall go on; not gritty little commuter runs, but voyages across whole continents. Those who ride up on the roofs of these titans will see entire landscapes unfolding before their eyes, new vistas, geographies; new worlds that have never felt the foot of man.
When the fast train slams past, Ashwin always looks forward for the first glints from the towers of Chandigarh through the smog haze. Ghost cities in the mist. The Cybermahals of the Indian Tiger. Curving scimitars of construction crystal, minarets of spun titanium and glass, curtain walls of solar tiling, battlements half a kilometer above the chawl sprawl of the Panjab. Ashwin seeks particularly the golden glint of the huge solar disk that fronts
