Insistence of Vision (14 page)

Our team foreman, Oleg Yevtutsov, also looked worried. But he was busy hitching up the team – Big Benjy and Lean Lennie – to chains that other space-suited men and women hurriedly wrapped around the mighty bole. The two mammuts waited patiently, passing time by prying up chunks of asteroid with their tusks and chomping them with diamond hard grinding molars, releasing volatiles and organics to fuel their massive bodies and spilling fine dust from their mouths. Little marmot-gleaners went after the dust, the truly valuable side-product of that munching.

Other teams were finishing, and several had already set off toward the rail head, dragging tree trunks or sleds loaded with photovoltaic leaves, destined for rooftops and highways all over Earth. The locomotive
Nicholas III
huffed and steamed before cars that would take the treasure in-system. Mother worked down there among the freight dollies, with their piles of freshly hewn and trimmed logs, doing the job she had desperately wrangled for, tallying cargo, tracking every item with meticulous care –

– before the train could finally speed off, riding twin superconducting tether-rails that stretched several million kilometers from asteroid to asteroid, connecting gulag to outpost to colony to town to resort, almost all the way to Mars.

But my eyes and sensor-percept weren’t tuned for sightseeing. At that moment, my sole thought was –
where are those two idiots!

Using up some of my slender propellant supply, I searched... and finally found them near the tree’s very tip, where Boris Strugalatsky squatted limply on a broken branch.
Weeping.
Soundlessly, having negligently or deliberately left his transmitter turned off. But the cheap plastic panel of his ushanka revealed a mouth that gaped rhythmically, and his blond-fuzzy cheeks glistened.

Landing nearby was tricky. The boys had left a botched mess of branch-stubs, jagged-skyward with axe-shattered points, making impact dangerous, even at two percent of Earth gravity. Only the special cleats that I had clamped below each boot – made from salvaged mammut molars – saved me from a cruel stabbing as I danced atop the shards, then flipped around in front of the young man.

“Boris, you and Arkady had better have a good –”

Then I saw his brother, lying face down amid the nearby craggy tangle. Knifelike, a crystal branch jabbed through one thigh.

It might still be okay,
I thought.
If the fool remembered to wear sealant underwear.”

Tugging on one arm of the prone figure – “Arkady, let’s get you out of here before...”

My voice trailed off.

I gaped at a second spearlike stub that had pierced the mammut-fur helmet, entering one eye.

But no. I hadn’t time for staring or disgust.

“Boris, snap out of it! We’ve got to get out of here.”

At any moment, Oleg might lose patience, or give in to the Overseer and yell “mush!” at the mammut sledge team. Or else, if the delay kept on, a newly-falling tree might smash us from above. Either way, it was insane to remain.

The surviving Strugalatsky stared at me blearily. So I upped transmit intensity and shouted.

“Did Arkady want the Second Chance? In this cold and vacuum, it might still be possible. Tell me now!”

Boris stared for several more precious seconds, during which I almost decided to clip him in the jaw, sling him over a shoulder and jet out of there. Only then he nodded. Dammit. I wished he hadn’t.

“Kakashkiya! Okay then, help me now or lose him forever!” Gingerly, I float-stepped into a somewhat stable open niche where I could apply leverage. “Move carefully!”

The niche was a bare patch between branches, and I noticed, with a fragment of attention, that
lines
had been etched – deeply-incised – into the hard tree-trunk, not far from Arkady’s head. Had he been making these marks, or peering at them, when the accident occurred?

No time to ponder such things! Applying my laser axe, I managed to cut loose the lance pinning Arkady’s thigh, but had to wait for sluggish Boris to get positioned before carefully doing the same under his brother’s head, leaving the shard where it was, for the cyborg-surgeons to deal with. Personally, I found this “second chance” option daunting and unpleasant, as did a majority of Earth’s human population. And Boris might still change his mind, before committing his brother to another destiny, a different kind of living, in some far-off place the Coss seldom spoke of, where nearly all the reclaimed-dead were sent.

At least they leave it a matter of personal and family choice. It’s never imposed. The Coss are that honorable.

Boris wailed again, this time audibly, when he saw his brother’s ravaged face. So loudly that it almost matched the trumpeting Elepent cries and warning shouts from Oleg and the Overseer.

I grabbed both idiots – one under each arm – flexed and leaped. A split second before the great tree shuddered and shifted, amid low mammut grunts, sending all remaining branches into a shuddering wave that would have torn us to shreds.

We weren’t out of danger yet! Arcing high, I realized we were about to get smacked between two sharp-studded maces – the tree-stump beneath us and one falling from above. An upward glance showed the approaching behemoth – till yesterday a living forest giant – now guided by a half dozen mighty pachyderms, each one clutching the great bole with four squat foot-hands, while using his agile trunk to aim a propellant gun. Dimly, I realized that they weren’t even trying to slow the tree’s plummet. Only to keep it oriented with one shorn side aimed down, to take the impact, leaving most of the valuable branches for harvest.

Calculating trajectories, I could tell we were drifting too slowly; the two trees would only collide glancingly, at their ends... where we happened to be!

I applied my jets, full blast.... if “blast” applied to that feeble thrust. Only when the bottle petered out did I realize –
I should have jettisoned Arkady. It might have saved our lives, Boris and me...

Should I have felt stupid about that? Or noble? During those few seconds, as the sky became a shimmering mass of gorgeously deadly crystal, I realized that soon it would hardly matter.
At least it should be quick,
I thought.
And there won’t be anything left for that awful “second chance.”

I braced...

...which was good, because a gray blur suddenly burgeoned from the right and
slammed
into us, knocking the air out of my lungs and cracking several ribs. Bellowing ululations filled my ears and a harsh, vice-like grip seized my left leg, swinging me about like a whip. I clamped down, uttering no more than a grunt while clutching the Strugalatsky brothers with ferocity I never knew I had.

Boris had no such compunctions or stoic control. He screamed.

In fact, he showed impressive durability, persistence and sheer lung power, howling as the falling tree glistened all around us in a million faceted rods, spires, and infinitely fractal twinkles, our rescuer blatting defiance while he dodged and zigged and zagged, evading razor-sharp branches –

– till we jetted into blackness above the lumberyard, flying high to escape the dust cloud and a billion glittering shards.

ᚖ

Yelena took care of thanking the bull elepent, whose name was
Tok
and who had intervened for her sake, not for a
mammut-lover
like me.

In any event, I was busy for a while, rushing Arkady Strugalatsky to the administration dome, where a CryoCare Company intern took over, starting the cool-down process while taking a next-of-kin affidavit from wailing Boris. Whereupon, at last, I slipped away, shivering in relief.

A few pats on the back. A gruff nod of respect from Oleg. Those were adequate acknowledgment for my “heroics,” though I knew there’d be a price. Yelena wasn’t going to let me forget that one of her gray friends had saved my ass.

Only none of that mattered. Right then, I had just one thought on my mind. To hurry back. To find the tree where the accident occurred and join the crew that was final-trimming it for shipment atop a huge, open-sided rail car. Oleg – impressed with my work ardor – urged me instead to rest, to attend to my battered rib cage and throbbing arms. But all of that could wait. I had to be part of finishing this one.

Along the way, I sent a personal blip.

–
Mother, drop everything and meet me. –

A dark figure over near the train – slimmer and smaller than most of the burly railroad workers – straightened and turned. I recognized her shabby winter coat and visored ushanka. Apparently, word of the accident hadn’t even reached this part of the yard. And why should it, yet, with only one casualty added to today’s tally board? On the whole, a better than average day. Well, good. She would only hear the story knowing how it ended. The best way.

–
What is it Sasha? –
She sent back. –
I am very busy. –

I replied simply. Curtly. She would find this worthwhile. Then I made her wait while I scampered along the great tree trunk, applying axe to stub in half a hundred places, before finally summoning her to come forth, picking her way along the path that I had made.

–
Sasha, this had better be –

I gestured for her to come forward, guiding with my hand on her arm, the first time that I had touched her in months. With a gesture, I insisted that we both cut off our radio transmitters, then touch helmet visors, to speak by conduction.

“I know what you’ve been looking for, Natalia Alexyevna Bushyeva. The reason that you chose this place, above all others, for our exile.”

Her eyes widened, then narrowed in practiced denial.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Come, we both have work –”

“Do you think I am a fool?” I answered, with unexpected heat. “Or ignorant? Or that the generation after yours would somehow forget the old stories? What did you take me for?
Do you think that I’m not Russian?”

She rocked back. And this time, after a moment’s indecision, she did me the honor of contemplating my words. Understanding them.

All over both planet Earth and the Solar System, humanity was coming to terms with harsh reality. With the way of the Coss, whose conquest swept aside such fragile things as “enlightenment,” or democracy, or the liberal way of viewing a gracious, benign universe.

That narrow age had flared so successfully, so brilliantly, it created a mass delusion. That all people might have worth, freedom and unlimited prospects. That competition might be so open, fair, individual and courteous, that it becomes indistinguishable from joyful cooperation. That anyone’s child might become as great as any other.

For a time, it seemed that Hawaii or California might be archetypes for a new, endlessly golden age – a sunny beach of prosperity, progress and opportunity. How few were those who pointed out the chief lesson of history – that ninety-nine percent of human generations had endured a far more classic, more archetypical human social structure.

First tribal chiefdoms... and then feudalism.

Mighty lords, applying total power over helpless vassals. During the Enlightenment Summer, some fools – Americans, especially – naively thought the long era of noble oppressors was over and done for good. In fact, they still, insanely, call feudalism an aberration, unstable and untenable, instead of the way that nature conspires with the strong.

And so, rebelling against the Coss time and again, Americans have died like wheat in the field.

But Russians never forgot. Amid the brightest days, even when others called us gloomy and dour, we knew. The tatars, the czars, the commissars and oligarchs... they murmured in our sleep, never letting us forget. And when the Coss came in overwhelming strength, re-establishing a feudal order – only with an alien caste on top – we Russians knew our options. There were... and are... and always will be just two.

To knuckle under, and survive.

Or to fight, but with the grinding, stoical patience of Pyotr Alexeyevich, or of Tolstoy. Or Lenin.

“We know the stories,” I told my mother, standing with her under vacuum-bright constellations. “How women used to plod for hundreds, even thousands of kilometers, following muddy roads... and then metal railroad tracks... slogging into far Siberia. Working to get by, doing laundry till their hands bled, moving from village to village in order to find the work camps. The gulags. Whereupon, each day when the train whistle blew –”

As if I had commanded it, a throbbing vibration shuddered underfoot and our audios picked up the throaty radio call – a five-minute warning from the
Nicholas III.

“The women gathered by the village siding where the locomotive stopped for water. They would hurry to the flat cars, loaded high with timber cut by prisoners. And they searched, combing the logs with their eyes and groping in among them with their hands.

“What was it they were looking for, mother? Can you tell me, honestly, at long last, what you came out here to seek?”

I bent and caught her eyes with mine. Haggard from years of sleepless worry, hers glistened with defiant pride.

“Initials,” she said with little breath, then adding softly. “Carved into the raw wood... by prisoners.”