Michaelmas (20 page)

"It's the best I can do," Michaelmas said. Down the aisle, Clementine had turned her seat to form a conversational group with Luis and Campion. Campion was talking in-tently. Clementine was responding and gesturing, her hands held forward and curved inward to describe shots, in the manner that made all directors resemble Atlas searching for a place to rest his burden. Luis sat back, his arms folded across his chest. Michaelmas reclined lower in his seat. "I would like to see Papashvilly as soon as possible after we reach Control. My crew chief is Mr Raschid Samir, and he'll be arriving by truck at the same time."

"Yes, that's arranged. Pavel is waiting for you. He says to meanwhile tell you the story about the aardvark and Marie Antoinette."

"It's the same story about the aardvark and Isadora Duncan, except that the Isadora Duncan version is better, since she is wearing a long scarf at the time."

"Ah."

"And could you let me know if you hear from Ossip about the sender?"

"On the instant."

"Grazie."
Michaelmas settled his head deeper between the sound-absorbent wings of his chair and closed his eyes.

Domino said: "The joke about the aardvark and Isadora Duncan is the same as the joke about the aardvark and Annie Oakley, except that Annie is firing a Sharps repeating carbine."

"Granted," Michaelmas said absently. He was comfortable and relaxed, and remembering Pavel Papashvilly in the back room of a chophouse around the corner from Cavanaugh's down on lower Eighth Avenue, after a recording at Lincoln Center.

"Cosmonautics and culture," Papashvilly was saying, lean-ing back on a fauteuil with his arm lightly across the shoulders of a member of the corps de ballet, "how allied!" The footage had been of Papashvilly at
Coppelia,
first walking at night like a demon of the steppes among the floodlit fountains of the plaza, afraid of nothing, a meter and a half in height, eyes flickering with reflections, grin-ning. The pause at the great glass doors, the head tilted up-ward, and the photosensitive mechanism swinging them apart without further human intervention. Now the click of heels on marble gave way to orchestrated music, and the opening credits and title came up.

Then at the perfor-mance he had smiled and oohed and aahed, hands elevated and tracing patterns in the air, and he had stood and applauded and shouted. Now he passed a palm delicately along wispy fabric at the dancer's pale shoulder. "What thin partitions," he murmured, winking at Michaelmas. He laughed, the dancer gave him a knowing sidelong look, and they all three had a little more steak and lobster and some more Rhine wine. "That will be a good thing, this visit. I know you American people are disappointed about Walter." He paused and took a sip, his lips pressed hard against the rim of the glass, his eyes looking off into a dimmer corner of the little room. "It was a stupid, need-less thing, whatever happened. We are not after all any longer doing things for the first or second time, correct ? But it is now for an understanding to be made that he and I and all the others, we are for all the people." He put the glass down and considered.

"And we are from all the people," he had added, and Michaelmas had smiled a little crookedly.

When he had seen the dancer's hand on Pavel's thigh he had excused himself and gone home.

The UNAC bus passed from the last tangle of feeder ramps and entered the straightline highway into the hills. There was no speed limit on this road; the passenger chairs moved a little on their gymbals as the acceleration built. A nearly inaudible singing occurred in Michaelmas's ear; something in the system somewhere was cycling very near the frequency he and Domino used between him and the terminal. A mechanic had failed to lock some service hatch. Noise leaked out of the propulsion bay. Michaelmas grimaced and ground his teeth lightly.

Coarse, scoured, and ivory-coloured in the sun beyond the windows, the foothills rose under the toned blue of the sky.

Norwood had stopped fussing with his leg. But he had also stopped being so animated, and was sitting with one corner of his lip pulled into his teeth, thoughtfully.

There had been a time a little later in the US tour, at a sports-car track in the gravel hills of eastern Long Island. Rudi Cherpenko had been conducting some tyre tests, and offered Papashvilly a ride if he had time. UNAC had thought it a fine idea, if Michaelmas or someone of that stature would cover it. Pavel had taken once around the track to learn how to drift and how to steer with the accelerator, and half around to learn how to brake and to deduce good braking points, and by then his adrenalin was well up. He went around five times more; he could be seen laughing and shouting in the cockpit as he drilled past the little cluster of support vehicles. When he was finally flagged off, he came in flushed and large-eyed, trembling. "Oy ah!" he had shouted, vaulting out of the cockpit.
"Jesus Maria,
what a thing this is to do!" He jumped at Cherpenko.

They guffawed and embraced, slamming their hands down between each other's shoulderblades with the car's engine pinging and contracting beside them as it cooled. Yet Michaelmas had caught the onset of sobriety in Papashvilly's eyes. He was laughing and shaking his head, but when he saw that Michaelmas was seeing the change in him, he returned a little flicker of a rueful smile.

Late that night in the rough-timbered bar of the Inn, with Cherpenko asleep in his room because of the early schedule, and the crew people off raising hell on Shelter Island, Papashvilly had sat staring out the window, beyond the reflection of their table candle, and beyond the silhou-ette of docked cabin boats. Michaelmas had listened.

"It is an intoxication," Papashvilly had begun. As he went on, his voice quickened whenever he pictured the things he talked about, slowed and lowered when he explained what they meant. "It takes hold."

Michaelmas smiled. "And you are back in the days of George the Resplendent?"

Papashvilly turned his glance momentarily sideward at Michaelmas, He laughed softly. "Ah, George Lasha of the Bagratid Empire. Yes, a famous figure. No, I think perhaps I go back farther than eight hundred years. You call me Georgian. In the Muscovite language, I am presumed a Gruzian. Certain careless speakers from my geographic area yet refer to Sakartvelo, the united kingdom. Well, some of us are very ambitious. And I cannot deny that in my blood there is perhaps some trace of the great Kartlos, and that I am of the eastern kingdom, that is, a Kartvelian."

He was drinking gin, as an experiment. He raised his glass, wrinkled his nose, swallowed and smiled at the win-dow. "There have been certain intrusions on the blood since even long before the person you call Alexander the Great came with his soldiers to see if it was true about the golden fleece, when Sakartvelo was the land of Colchis. I am per-haps a little Mingrelian, a little Kakhetian, a little Javak-hete, a little Mongol . . ." He put his hand out flat, thumb and palm down, and trembled it slightly. "A little of this and that." He closed his fist. "But my mother told me on her knee that I am an Ossete of the high grassy pastures, and we were there before anyone spoke or wrote of any other people in those highlands. We have never relinquished them. No, not to the Turks, not to Timur the Lame and his elephants, nor to the six-legged Mongols. It was different, of course, in the lowlands, though those are stout men." He nodded to himself. "Stout men. But they had empires and relinquished them."

He put down his glass again and held it as if to keep it from rising, while he looked at it inattentively. "To the south of us is a flood of stone - the mountain, Ararat, and the Elburz, and Iran, and Karakorum, and Himalaya. To the north of us is the grass that rolls from the eastern world and breaks against the Urals. To the east and west of us are seas like walls; it is the grass and stone that toss us on their surf. Hard men from the north seek Anatolia and the fat sultan-ates. Hard men from the south seek the Khirgiz pasturage and the back door to Europe.

Two thousand years and more we clung to our passes and raided from our passes, becoming six-legged
in
our turn, until the sultans tired, and until the Ivan Grodznoi, whom you call The Terrible, with his can-non crushed the Mongols of the north." Papashvilly nodded again. "And so he freed his race that Timur-i-leng created and called slaves—" Papashvilly shrugged. "Perhaps they are free forever. Who knows? Time passes. We look south, we look north, we see the orchards, we smell the grass. Our horses canter and paw the air. But we cling, do we not, because the age of the six-legged is over, is it not? Now we are a Soviet Socialist Republic and we have the privilege of protecting Muscovy from the south. Especially since Josef. Perversity!

Our children have the privilege of going to Muscovite academies if we are eligible, and ..." He put his hand on Michaelmas's forearm. "But of how much interest is this to you? In your half of the world, there is of course no history. One could speak to the Kwakiutl or the Leni-Len-ape and the Apache, I suppose, but they have twice for-gotten when they were six-legged people and they do not remember the steppes. No, you understand without offence, Lavrenti, that there is enough water between this land and the land of your forefathers to dissolve the past for you, but where I was born there has been so much blood and seed spilled on the same ground over and over that sometimes there are new men, they say, who are found in the pastures after the fog: men who go about their business unspeaking, and without mothers."

Papashvilly put down his empty glass. "Do they have coffee here with whisky in it? I think I like that better. Ah, this business with the sports car...." He shook his head. "You know, it is true : all we peoples who live by the horse — not your sportsmen or your hobbyists, not anyone who is free to go elsewhere and wear a different face—we say that man is six-legged who no longer counts the number of his legs. But this is not love of the animal; it is love of the self as the self is made greater, and why hide it? Let me tell you how it must be — ah, you are a man of sharp eyes, I think you know how it is: On the grass ocean there are no roads, so everything is a road, and everything is the same, so the distances will eat your heart unless you are swift, swift, and shout loud. I think if Dzinghiz Khan—I give him this, the devil, they still speak his name familiarly even on the Amber Sea—if the Dzinghiz Khan had been shown an armoured car, there would have been great feasts upon horseflesh in that season, and thereafter the fat cities would have been taxed by the two-hundred-litre drum. The horse is a stubborn, dirty, stupid animal that reminds me of a sheep. Its only use is to embody the wings a man feels within him, and to do this it lathers and sweats, defecates and steps in badger holes."

Then he had smiled piercingly. "But really, it is the same with cars, too." His voice was soft and sober. "I would not like Rudi to hear me say that. He's a good fellow. But it's also the same with rockets. If you have wings inside, nothing is really fast enough. You do the best you can, and you shout loud."

They were well into the hills, now. Campion was smiling at Norwood and trying to get him into conversation. Nor-wood was shaking his head silently. Clementine was stretched out in her seat, sipping through a straw at an ice from the refreshment bar, raising one eyebrow as she chatted with Luis. It seemed reasonable to suppose they had been a great many places together.

Michaelmas grimaced and closed his eyes again.

There was the night before the goodwill visit was at an end and Papashvilly was due to be at Star Control the next day. There had been a long, wet dinner at the Rose Room, and then they had gone for a constitutional along Fifth Avenue in the middle of the night. As they stepped off a curb, a fast car had turned a corner tightly, with no regard to them, Michaelmas had scrambled back with a shout to Papashvilly. Pavel had stopped still, allowing the rear fender to pass him by millimetres. As it passed, he brought down his fist hard on the rear deck sheet-metal with an enormous banging sound that echoed between the faces of the stores. The security escort out in the shadows had pointed their guns and the camera crews had jolted their focus. The car had screamed to a halt on locked wheels, slewing sideward, and the driver's window had popped open to reveal a pale, frightened, staring face. "Earthman!" Papashvilly had shouted, his fists clenched. His knees and elbows were bent. His head thrust forward on his corded neck.

"Earthman!" But he was beginning to laugh, and he was relaxing. He walked forward and rumpled the driver's hair fondly. "Ah, earthman, earthman, you are only half drunk." He turned away and continued down the avenue.

They walked a little more, and then they had all gone back toward the hotel for a night-cap. At the turn onto Forty-fourth Street, Papashvilly had stopped for a moment and looked around.

"Goodbye, Fifth Avenue," he said. "Goodbye library, goodbye Rockefeller Center, goodbye ca-thedral, goodbye Cartier, goodbye FAO Schwarz, goodbye zoo."

Michaelmas looked up and down the avenue with him, and nodded.

Sitting alone together in the Blue Bar after everyone else had left, they each had one more for the hell of it. Papash-villy had finally said quietly:

"You know what it is ?"

"Perhaps."

Papashvilly had smiled to himself. "The world is full of them. And I will tell you something: they have always known they will be left behind. That's why they're so careless and surly.

"Ah."

"The city people and the farmers. They have always known their part in the intent of history.

That's why the have their roofs and thick walls—so they can hide and also say that it's no longer out there."

"I wouldn't know what you're talking about. I have no understanding of history."

Papashvilly burst into laughter. At the end of the room,

Eddie had looked up briefly from the glass he was towelling. "You know. Some do not. But you know." He smiled and shook his head, drumming impatiently on the edge of their table. "These have been peculiar centuries lately. Look how it was. From the beginning of time, the six-legged came from the steppes, and only the mountains and the seas held some of them away, but not always and not forever.