The Year's Best Science Fiction, Vol. 20

The dog scuffled at his heels, horrified that it was missing something. Antti shoved it away with his foot. Dare break the moment and, Yuri notwithstanding, I will poison you. Twice a year, summer and winter, was a meager ration of wonder stuff, and its half-life was so short. Years and peers and sophistication would kill that thing you feel, orbiting beneath the models of the ships that should have taken us to Mars.

Yuri stopped.

“That one. That wasn’t here before.”

“It’s new, that’s why.”

“I can see that. Show me.”

Antti pulled over the peeling swivel chair to stand on and unhook the curved delta of aerobody from its fishing line rig.

“What’s that bit?”

“That’s the fuel processing module. The idea was that it would go down first, maybe even six months before, and manufacture the fuel for the return trip.”

“An empty tank mission.”

“Empty tanks.” The boy had the language. “That’s right.”

Yuri turned the aerodynamic plastic wedge over in his hands, stopped at a hieroglyph in curvilinear blue.

“This isn’t Russian,” he pronounced. “I know this sign. That says NASA. But I don’t know this bit.” A line of red, alien letters above the noble blue insignia.

“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.