Free Engineering Infinity by Jonathan Strahan Page B

friend and whatever it is he found. What
was it, anyway?”
    A strange suspicion had begun to
form in Gennady’s mind, but it was so unlikely that he shook his head. “I want
to look at the Tsarina site,” he said. “Maybe that’ll
tell us.”
    Egorov was obviously unsatisfied
with that answer, but he said nothing, merely muttering and trying to get
himself comfortable in the Tata’s bucket seat. After a while, just as the hum
of the dark highway was starting to hypnotize Gennady, Egorov said, “It’s all
gone to Hell, you know.”
    “Hmm?”
    “Russia. It was hard in the old days,
but at least we had our pride.” He turned to look out the black window. “After
1990, all the life just went out of the place. Lower birth-rate, men drinking
themselves to death by the age of forty... no ambition, no hope. A lost land.”
    “You left?”
    “Physically, yes.” Egorov darted
a look at Gennady. “You never leave. Not a place
like this. For many years now, I’ve struggled with how to bring back Russia’s
old glory - our sense of pride. Yet the best I was
ever able to come up with was an online environment. A game.” He spat the word contemptuously.
    Gennady didn’t reply, but he knew
how Egorov felt. Ukraine had some of the same problems - the lack of direction,
the loss of confidence... It wasn’t getting any better here. He thought of the
blasted steppes they were passing through, rendered unlivable by global
warming. There had been massive forest fires in Siberia this year, and the Gobi
desert was expanding north and west, threatening the Kazaks even as the Caspian
Sea dwindled to nothing.
    He thought of SNOPB. “They’re
gone,” he said, “but they left their trash behind.” Toxic, decaying: nuclear
submarines heeled over in the waters off Murmansk, nitrates soaking the soil
around the launch pads of Baikonur. The ghosts of old Soviets prowled this
dark, as radiation in the groundwater, mutations in the forest, poisons in the
all-too-common dust clouds. Gennady had spent his whole adult life cleaning up
the mess, and before yesterday he’d been able to tell himself that it was
working - that all the worst nightmares were from the past. The metastables had
changed that, in one stroke rendering all the old fears laughable in
comparison.
    “Get some sleep,” he told Egorov.
“We’re going to be driving all night.”
    “I don’t sleep much anymore.” But
the old man stopped talking, and just stared ahead. He couldn’t be visiting his
online People’s Republic through his glasses; those IP addresses were blocked
here. But maybe he saw it all anyway - the brave young men in their trucks,
heading to the Semipalatinsk site to witness a nuclear blast. The rail yards
where parts for the giant moon rocket, doomed to explode on the pad, were
mustering... With his gaze fixed firmly on the past, he seemed the perfect
opposite of Ambrose with his American dreams of a new world unburdened by
history, whose red dunes marched to a pure and mysterious horizon.
    The first living thing in space
had been the Russian dog Laika. She had died in orbit - had never come home. If
he glanced out at the star-speckled sky, Gennady could almost see her ghost
racing eternally through the heavens, beside the dead dream of planetary
conquest, of flags planted in alien soil and shining domes on the hills of
Mars.
     
    They arrived at the Tsarina site at 4:30. Dawn, at this latitude and time of
year. The Semipalatinsk Polygon was bare, flat, blasted scrubland: Mars with
tufts of dead weed. The irony was that it hadn’t been the hundreds of nuclear
bombs set off here that had killed the land; even a decade after the Polygon
was closed, the low rolling hills had been covered with a rich carpet of waving
grass. Instead, it was the savage turn of the climate, completely unpredicted
by the KGB and the CIA, that had killed the steppe.
    The road into the Polygon was
narrow blacktop with no real shoulder, no ditches, and no oncoming