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 silhouette 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 window. “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 perhaps a little Mingrelian, a little Kakhetian, a little Javakhete, 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 sultanates. 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 cannon 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-Lenape and the Apache, I suppose, but they have twice forgotten 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. Norwood 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 cathedral, 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. Papashvilly had finally said quietly: