Terraplane Read online

  "They've punched up the lyrics," I whispered to Skuratov, noticing a variorum libretto in use.

  "Public domain," he explained. The women tore off their black cloaks during the first bridge, prancing thereafter in glitter and G-strings, headpieces affixed topside. Bending, they wiggled towards us. Russians loved shoving acres of flesh into centimeters of cloth and studying the result.

  "What is this agitpop?" asked Jake, unable to pull his look from the action. One of the nuns swung over the stage on a rope, felling the statue as she hit her mark.

  "Muzhiki!!" came a cry rearward. At this alert Jake moved; we were up before the splintering rang. A Mongol shattered empties floorways. Before his bottle shards impressed full, the bouncers buried him beneath their tonnage. Onstage nuns wrapped young men around them as if to keep warm. The song concluded with an atonal thud. The clientele-Skuratov, too-stood, applauding.

  "All was intentional?" I asked.

  "How else?" said Skuratov, reseating with watchful look. Kidin turned his attention from us back to the Kazakhs. The principals onstaged for the next number. Tony seemed not to be of troublesome Polish descent in this adaptation. Maria's paint, mahogany dark, offset her blond curls. Neither danced; of good voice, they sang "One Hand, One Heart." Audience murmur supplanted audience roar. Looking up I saw Jake's face radiate as if lit from within. A tear dropped from his dead-coal eye, perhaps fearful that if seen it might be blown away. His pox-scarred expression fixed solid; he could have been zooing, watching baby ducks at play, or viewing that little girl of whom Skuratov spoke tumble as the echo faded. Hypnotized, I watched that tear shuffle along his cheek into darkness. It was like seeing a tank cry.

  "Ochen krasiva!" Jake, drawn from his mourn, swiveled round; the commentator was already set upon by the bouncers, who entwined him like vines strangling a tree. Kidin perked; with fellow Krasnayaviki, advantaging the sitch, they leapt up to beat the Kazakhs with their heavy knouts. The room's tension peaked. The song's last bars were swallowed in curse's roar and crockery's rattle.

  "Khulighani-" Rifles showed, clicked, weren't yet fired. The performers stepped forward to view the floor show

  "A delicious dinner," said Skuratov, rising. "Shall we?"

  We jostled through the crowd, stamping the fallen when needed, until we exited. Between interior and exterior one hundred degrees vanished. My lungs rustled like paper when I drew in air. Snow powdered the long blue line of people awaiting entry.

  "You're staying where?" Skuratov asked, thrusting hands into furry pockets. Trim as he was, the type of coat he wore, a shuba, impressioned his look as three hundred kilos heavier. Ten bears gave their lives to warm his final years.

  "Sheraton Kremlin," I said, "on Kitajski Prospect."

  "Not the Moskva?"

  "My choice." A firetrap; too obvious, besides.

  "Let me offer you warm ride." The wind scarred us. Skuratov's official car, a Chaika, was curbsided on Chudozestvannogo Teatra Prospect. Russian limos resembled America's; Gorki-Detroit factories built both and supplied both countries as a rare joint venture. Chaikas, Krasnaya's preferred vehicle, retained the styling of cars forty years old. The Czara, the Politburo, leading members of Krasnaya and old Heroes of the State, all prone to nostalgia in weak moments, rode Chaikas.

  "Look. Perhaps we shouldn't interrupt such pleasure." The chauffeur reclined in the back seat, eyeing a movie on the TVC. A vodka bottle, full only of air, lay next to him. "Out!" shouted Skuratov, opening the door. "Do your duty." The chauffeur tumbled forth, slinking frontways. "Ten minutes, we're there." But in vidding time away the chauffeur had drained the battery. Switch ing from idle to drive, he stalled the car. Striving to restart it, he succeeded in making the engine wail as if it were being beaten. Even while arrnied I allowed myself to be driven but twice, during state funerals. I felt safer when I guided the wheel, once another started the engine.

  "Let us have brisk walk, then," muttered Skuratov, decarring. "Call for new limo from hotel's comfortable lobby. Leave this zek here. By morning he'll feel ice below instead of balls. Come."

  Frost ferns sprouted across the windshield as we cruised away down Gorki. Moscow's streets dichotomized after the sun fell from daily grace. Krasnaya sealed and patrolled all avenues holding government Buros, the homes of notables, banks and the larger business blocks. Gorki Street, so wide as to allow passage of five tanks tread to tread, was of the secular world, and provided trade's entertainment nightlong. It might have been noon, so peopled and trafficked was the boulevard. Most businesses on the main strips followed the seven/twenty-four plan, forever open to handle unceasing demand. Citizens passed as if on enforced parade, many pushing red carts topful with freezers, washers, T'VCs, copiers; all manner of technologic flotsam. Staring into their puffy, bloodshot eyes disconcerted. Refugees' faces held similar looks in every land I'd troubled; the look of these fit naught but for breathing and running, forced by us to abandon home and race the roads before the other team, purposeful and timeshort, landed to steal their days away.

  "What demands the wait?" Jake asked, spotting one store's queue running down Gorki and then Belinskogo to a length of sixty meters. "Bread?"

  Skuratov perused the storewindowed posters. "Electronic food reconstitutors. "

  By using those one metamorphosed sawdust into bread; transmogrified dust into spice. So long as the machines worked, they enabled any semiusable to become the near-real. Russia, as did all countries, traded homegrown goods through standard barter, simultaneously balancing the unpayable debts and obtaining desired goods. With Krasnaya overseeing, the system's efficiency was twice redoubled. Peru needed no caviar in exchange for guano but that was what reached the Andes in return; Krasnaya ran the homegrown with equally just rationale. For every Odomovana dishwasher assembled, fourteen DL-50 mortars entered inventory as well; for every Chaika rolling off the line, thirty Turgenev rocket launchers showed on the field. By controlling all, Krasnaya kept all bottomlined, and all citizens, if not happy, then quiet.

  "A lovely night," said Skuratov, sliding on sanded ice underfoot. "The stars are so clearly seen in our hemisphere."

  Sparrows flocked solid on pavement grates, warming chilled feathers. Red stars apexed Kremlin towers downstreet as they had for a century, everstable amidst the nine floodlit domes of Blagovashchenski Cathedral, the Telespire and the three-pronged unistructure blossoming above the Hotel Moskva. Nature gave Moscow little light overall; Krasnaya compensated. Red neon delineated each building's form along both sides of Gorki. Centerlaned were long-legged metal bugs on tiptoe, balancing upon their backs huge arc lamps similar to those we'd used in our camps, lamps so hot that birds flying into them vaporized. At every second corner a searchlight slashed the sky. Each building's facade shone with fluorescence and plasmalight and argon gas; holograms and vidscreens displayed vast quantities of purchasable stuff. Signs' light-formed slogans never reiterated pedantic messages or antiAmerican saws but sent forth instead the world's standard litany: Drink Pepsi, Use Bulat, You Deserve, This Is It. Some few phrases showed in no place other than Russia; We Know, said one, But Tell Us. One vast screen hid eight floors; bore nothing but a frozen headshot of the Big Boy, drawn oldstyle, so that he looked to sit not at the hand of God, but on it. The eyes didn't follow your progress, but if you were guilty-you always were-you thought that they did. The letterscroll continually running beneath read: POSTBIRTH- DAY MADNESS AT GRIGORENKO FURNITURE MART. The birthday was three months past.

  "Stalin vsegda s nami," said Skuratov, looking upward, safe from the lure.

  "Pardon?" Jake asked.

  "He is always with us," he translated. "That is terrible difficulty with our new mutual friend." By his squints and winks I secured that, for the second, we might freespeak.

  "Difficulty in what way?" I asked, my lips so stiffened by cold that their vague movement could show nothing.

  "Krasnaya knows value of symbiosis. The Big Boy suits our purposes so long as his like never again arrives. But ou
r friend iscurrent phrase? Retrovert. Unnatural love of the past. Commercial images seen as those of great beings, rather than of useful idiots."

  "That problematicked?"

  "Certainly. She believes he was-" Skuratov danced across possible phrases. "She digs him the most, we said as teenagers. I myself was great fan of Abba and of your own Dean Reed. Our policies work too well sometimes."

  The Czara served as figurehead for imagined popular affection, but no one knew, or cared, how he, or she, manifested; every fool knew every pore on the Big Boy's face.

  "Watch!" said Jake, drawing us close as a man passed full tilt downstreet, two others heeling close, bearing in. "Politicals?"

  "Chuchmiki," said Skuratov. "Asian trash."

  Moscow was no more dangerous than any American city. Between the restaurant and Marx Prospect we traveled six blocks, passing seven robberies, three assaults and something of gray nature, half spat and half rape. Unless political infractions evidenced, on uncontrolled streets all was watched and nothing stopped. Though their vehicles' sirens forever sent their synthetic pig's squeals across the dark, no police-not the General Militia, the Krasnaya Guard, the Consumer Patrol, the City Druzhinhas, the Okhranha, certainly never the Dream Team-interfered with hooligans' free enterprise. As in America, one of Russia's myriad charms was that you could be murdered without reason and not even God would notice, or care.

  "We cross under here," said Skuratov, pausing before a stairway that led to a tunnel below-street. I considered situational inherencies. "We will miss terrible Marx Prospect traffic. Follow."

  The tunnel's bone white walls seemed never to have suffered the human touch. Concealed vents at each end deflected the piercing wind rushing through from above; the tunnel light cowered along the ceiling's edge. At the halfway point someone marched down the cracked, stained steps we'd hoped to approach.

  "Possible problem," said Skuratov. The one new-appeared wore checkered trousers, a cloth cap and a knee-length leatheresque coat, and looked to be of the southern mountains, perhaps from Armenia. At five meters distant he extracted a blue-metal longbarrel Omsk. 44, a make availabled only through official channels. Most Russian guns reaching citizens' hands were poptoys, worthless even if usable, and illegal in any event. An Omsk could bring down a small plane.

  "Public defender," said Skuratov, which was local slang for such a mugger. "This might be final moment, friends. Beg for mercy if you wish."

  "Zdrastye," said the man, in shivering voice. "Such fine clothes. Shuck them, please." His Russian was inept; his wrists, where visible, were no larger than mailing tubes. "Off!" Skuratov slipped off his shuba, tossed down his astrakhan.

  "Do as desired," said Skuratov, eyeing me with calm. "If we don't live it will not matter if we freeze."

  "It will," said Jake, doffing his own, lighter coat, showing the white linen three-piece he wore yearround, standing in apprehensive reverence as if the national anthem rushed through his ears. Jake wasn't big, though he impressioned such; wasn't slow, though he moved so deliberately that he seemed forever to be gliding across gelatin; wasn't stupid, though until you believed you knew him you wouldn't have figured. He didn't seem dangerous at all.

  "Uncoat! Please obey, please."

  Our terrorist seemed unnerved and amateurish; any delay might suffice. "What gives, friend?" I asked, wording Turkish, a language unfamiliar to both Skuratov and Jake, but not, I hunched, to him.

  "Asian brother," he replied, in like tongue. "I regret." Interesting; but before more might pass Jake raised his foot, kicking the pistol downtunnel. He shouted and brokeaway.

  "Don't scream!!" yelled Jake, his voice ringing along the walls. To see his rolling flip was to watch an angel descend from heaven. Leaping up, Jake heeled him twixt the scapulae, felling him timber-style. Jake booted him onto his back, then swung his fist sharply against the Adam's apple. The fellow's limbs thrashed as if on motor overload; spasms blurred his features. Close in, he showed fewer than twenty years agrowing; reminded me of one of my many lost sergeants. Jake kneeled over him as if to pray, smoothing the boy's long hair away from his brow.

  "Let's go," said Skuratov, recovering his hat and coat, managing to appear both more and less bothered than I felt he should have been. "You are as we hear, Jake. Come now Babushki will sweep in morning before commuters arrive. Don't delay." His voice betrayed no unreasoned emotion.

  "Hold." Jake spun the retrieved pistol twice round his forefinger, testing the balance.

  "Leave him," said Skuratov. "He can consider the errors of his life. "

  "Never need to suffer overlong," said Jake, unclicking the safety. Pressing his thumb and his fingers against the boy's jaw, Jake squeezed open his mouth, inserted the barrel. "Hurts?" he asked, his voice soft, as if confessing to uncaring mother. "Here. Peace."

  I shut my eyes; once retired it no longer necessitated that violence must be watched. Air's whuff sounded loud as shot's blast as the boy's breath left his body. Maybe too many field trips left me unwilling; maybe too many takeouts left Jake hungry for more. When I reopened I saw him examining the lacy pattern of blood beneath the boy's head, pondering the flowery petals of brain, as if considering form and texture. Art knew its fashion, whatever the season.

  "So pretty," Jake whispered.

  Less blood reddened Skuratov's face; he looked to have heard the woodcock, in Russian phrase. Had he expected? To enter Russia was to enter a world but roughly correspondent to the one known, a world whose logic demanded that seeds would grow in sand, that plants there grown would look right once paint made their colors more natural. Had he expected? I decided not. There was no greater reason for him to have served us so well over the years. Subtlety was all; there was no subtlety in having us termed in that tunnel.

  "What'd he call you, Luther?" Jake asked, pocketing the Omsk for future frolic. Some mutterance sufficed his curiosity as we hoteled ourselves, taking leave of Skuratov until the next morn. Too rarely I'd had men such as Jake with me in combat-over Mexico, in New Guinea, along the coast of Turkey; Johnson was with me on Long Island's Martianed dunes, in the old days, and Johnson was the only one who neared Jake's level. Still, only with Jake siding me would I always have won.

  JAKE SLEPT; LOOKING NO MORE HARMFUL THAN A BABY COBRA. That night I waited till he bedded safely before linking up the TVC's monitor and the telephone. Upon transmission override's directive the screen glowed skin white, a grateful relief. Our room's media-as in all Russian hotels, American owned or not-were adjusted, and could be ordinarily neither switched off nor turned down, so that advertisements might at least subliminally sink through the murk of travelers' brains. That the phone, too, was tapped made no difference. Inserting earphones, hooking my vocal scrambler to my collar, I ran the codes; tied into the New York mainframe to contact Alice, my company's computer. Unsullied info essentialled, and if Alice didn't have it, no one did.

  "Alice," I said. "QL789851ATM. Safeguard. Closed channel sole. Audionse per basic." Ocean blue washed the white from the monitor's screen.

  `All secured," she voiced across the waves. "I was concerned if you could transmit, Luther. Have you decided how I might be of help?"

  "Info needed pertinent to Oktobriana Osipova. Target residence city Dubna. Present whereabouts unknown. Possibly Novy Marina Roshcha, street unknown. Krasnaya file 9320005441-"

  "Hold."

  Hearing an unexpected creak, I flattened against my chair's back, sealing my breath. Jake lay deathstill, his pocket-player's phones tightclamped, the old sound he adored massaging his mind. No lyrics shook their speakers but those of Robert Johnson, the blues singer of the century past. His words came as whispers through the muffle.

  "I sent for my baby-and she don' come-"

  There came no further creaks; the sound of the building aching as it aged, I decided, though the walls' wrinkles looked no deeper. The purr of cameras recording our lack of movement grew so familiar as that of a loving pet, so long as you removed yourself from lensview.
/>   "Luther," said Alice after a five-minute absence, "Krasnaya's limitless files accessible only through local retrieval modes account for my delay. Please forgive."

  "They'd roadblocked overmuch?"

  "Using false headings, standard codes, the usual chicanery, they had buried her file quite deep."

  "What's shown?"

  "Oktobriana Dmitrievna Osipova received special tutorials at the Fourth School of Physics and Mathematics. While attending classes at Moscow State University, under Krasnaya supervision, she also took courses at Lumumba Institute, studying the use of scientific theory when applied to political objectives. A fruitful field, as we know-"

  "No editorials, Alice."

  "Her senior thesis on Lysenko was never published, having proved acceptable but inappropriate to Krasnaya objectives. Copies move through the samizdat matrix network to this day under pseudonymous listing. After she was graduated she was assigned to the Leningrad Selective Service Program, receiving doctorates in theoretical physics, environmental engineering and neurological bioadaptation. "

  "Blo," I repeated. "Learning to make pigs glow in the dark-"

  "As her thesis in that particular field, she created the recombinant gene plasma that eliminates neurofibromatosis. In physics her study on the military applications of Tesla coils remains unpublished."

  "What's a Tesla coil?"

  "An air-core transformer with primary and secondary coils tuned to resonate," she said. "Converts low-voltage high current into high-voltage low current at high frequencies."

  "English, Alice."

  "They produce usable electricity and small ones are in common use today though they were invented over a century ago. Their inventor, Tesla, was brilliant but prone to develop theories years in advance of possible application. One of his ideas concerned the use of enormous coils harnessed to high towers so that through means of resonation electrical power might be drawn not only from the sky but from the earth itself, creating a source of perpetual energy as well as a potential instrument of enormous nonnuclear destruction. I infer that she was working with that concept in particular." "What else have you?"