He was married, Mayakenska suddenly remembered. No children, she was fairly sure, and he’d never mentioned his wife, but it was possible he was concerned for her.
“I can let you off in the city,” she told him,“if you want. Otherwise I’ll go around, stay off the highways.”
He was silent so long she thought he might not have heard her at all. Then, finally, he shook his head.“Go on. I’m with you.”
Once they left the main highway, they were confined to dirt and gravel roads.A month earlier they would have been axle-deep in red mud, but spring was giving way to summer, the roads were dry, and the entire countryside was in flower.This is what it’s like, Mayakenska thought, to truly be Russian; even now, with chaos closing in, she wanted to stop the car and bury her face in the sweet, fertile earth of rodina, Mother Russia. It was a love that never conflicted with her other single greatest desire: to touch the red soil of Russia’s furthest colony,
She was too valuable, the Party had told her, to be risked in the cosmonaut program.There were simply not enough high-ranking women to serve as examples of the Party’s mythical lack of sexism, and far too many disasters in space.They didn’t care that the promise of Mars had lured her into the Army from her engineering career in the first place; they assumed a promotion and authority over the program would be enough.
What the Party didn’t know was that she had trained alongside the cosmonauts, studied all their textbooks, sat through all their lectures, sculpted her body into better condition than those of women half her age. It brought her the respect of her students, and when her moment came, she knew she would be ready.
She never got the chance. By the time the Americans sent their last expedition to shut down the Frontera base, the Soviet Union was overextended at home. Crop failures and famine were more important than prestige in space, and Marsgrad was left to find its own way.
That had been five years ago. Mayakenska had not even heard of the Marsgrad fire from her own people, but read about it in the New York Times. Her friends, cosmonauts she had trained, had been abandoned there; she had no way of knowing which of them had survived the fire and made it to the American base. Not that it mattered, for surely the Americans were dead now as well.
So why was Zvezdagrad so important to her? It was a question she hardly needed to ask herself.Without Zvezdagrad, Russia would not go into space again, not within her lifetime.And if she didn’t save it, no one would.
She parked the Zhiguli outside Mission Control in Kaliningrad as the sun was beginning to set.The base was an anthill that had been kicked to pieces: abandoned vehicles blocked the streets, civilians and soldiers swarmed over the grounds without apparent purpose. Holding her embossed red work pass in front of her, Mayakenska began shouting orders to anyone who would listen.Within minutes she had the base sealed off; by the time it was fully dark she and Valentin were on a helicopter headed for Tyuratam. On her instructions the big Kama trucks were already carrying every piece of space hardware she had been able to locate toward the Central Asian steppes.
If nothing else, she thought, watching the endless miles of empty land unroll into the night, she had gained an appreciation of the way Novikov had risen so quickly.The workers at Kaliningrad, even the officers, had seemed absurdly grateful for any voice of authority.The dissidents who wanted a truly democratic society in Russia had no idea of the enormity of what they were asking.
“So,”Valentin said, his blond good looks even more wasted and sickly-looking in the green light of the control panel,“now we will have Zvezdagrad.What are we going to do with it?”
“Hold it,” Mayakenska said.“Hold it and wait.”
She held Zvezdagrad for seven months, the longest seven months of her life. She took cows and goats and chickens from the nearby village of Tyuratam at gunpoint, then offered the villagers sanctuary within her walls.They refused, of course; from the outside the space center looked depressingly like a Gulag, with its miles of barbed wire and its grim cinderblock buildings.
Most of the villagers died a few weeks later when the People’s Independent Army of Kazakhstan swept through the steppes like a modern Mongol horde, on the backs of jeeps and dune buggies and balloon-tired motorcycles, armed with Kalishnikov machine guns and towing what appeared to be a tactical nuclear ground-to-ground missile.
Mayakenska let them pass.They in turn seemed to feel the center wasn’t worth the trouble of getting past the fortifications.The surviving villagers didn’t agree.They attacked Zvezdagrad with the puny weapons they had available, and Mayakenska saw no way to reason with them. She ordered her people to fire on them, and they lived with the stench of decaying bodies for the next two weeks.
The radio, when it worked, brought news of the capital.The chekists had been the first to try to fill the power vacuum.While their communication lines were second to none, the apex of their power structure had been amputated in the Army coup.Without experienced leadership, their authority never solidified. Looters began shooting anyone in kgb gray uniforms, and the rape of Moscow went on.
In the end it was the unions that began to organize the pieces. Under the old order they had been just another arm of the state, responsible for morale and unemployment benefits, but when the first cases of cholera appeared on the streets, they extended their responsibilities. Mayakenska began to hear words like “corporate infrastructure” and “bottom line” on the radio. Using the zaibatsus and the multinationals for models, the unions put together a new, decentralized society.
On New Year’s Eve she put the traditional three pieces of paper under her pillow and went to sleep, alone, sober, and aching with hunger. In the morning she pulled out one of the pieces, unfolded it, saw the words “Good Year.”
“Please,” she said, sitting on the edge of the bed, glad there was no one to see her crying.“Please.”
She sent a cable to the old Aeroflot address in Moscow that after-noon.Within a week, the first company representatives had flown out to see what could be done with several square kilometers of vintage space hardware. Mayakenska was awarded the honorary rank of vice president, and all her loyal supporters were hired by the company.
“There is one condition,” she said, staring at the fine, meaningless print of the “contract” they wanted her to sign.“If there is another mission to Mars, I will be on it.”
“No problem,” said one of the other vice presidents. He was western educated, and wore glasses with colored frames, a silk shirt and tie, and dzhinsi pants.
“Write it down,” she said.“Write it in your contract.”
The company representatives looked at each other, and then they shrugged.The vice president with the colored glasses amended the contract and Mayakenska signed it and they all shook hands.And then, because they were Russians, the vodka bottle finally appeared and they drank to the dawn of a new age.
They seemed to expect her to retire to her dacha and her pension, but instead she brought her cosmonauts back to Kaliningrad and the training facilities at Zvezdny Gorodok. For three years. she put up with the bemused acceptance of her new superiors. She would have put up with it for another ten, but she didn’t have to.Word had come from one of the moles buried deep within Pulsystems of the incredible discoveries at Frontera base.
“We are ready,” she told her board of directors, and less than three months later she was back at Zvezdagrad, strapped into a modified Soyuz, pointed at Mars.
For Mayakenska, history was the irrelevant process by which a present moment was constructed. By extension, the present was no more than a tool for shaping the future.And this, she told herself, thinking of the laser orbiting over her head, is what I have to do.