Polostan (Bomb Light #1)

by Neal Stephenson

“You were born into a red dawn and now, even though I don’t believe in superstitions, I think that these red sunsets mean something. The sun is setting on your childhood. You’re a grown woman now.

Being gazed at by men, she had learned, was as much a part of the natural order of things as gravity.

“Let me tell you something, girl,” Booker said. “I almost called you child, but this is not child talk. When it comes down to it, men do not care. They got an eye for everything.” “Then why do women—” “Women dress that way for each other. You want to make friends with a girl, you go get yourself all dressed up. With a boy? Better think twice.”

A chukker lasted seven minutes. She felt like making the most of it. A strong sense had overtaken her in recent days of bad things about to happen. For all she knew, she might end up in prison. The freedom and power she felt on this beautiful horse was not a thing to waste.

The game had somehow become all about him. He was one of those men who cannot rest until he is the center of all notice, even if it is hostile.

“You and I are warriors.” This was Patton, talking to her ear during a dance. “This is why we recognize each other, as if we had fought side by side in some battle of old. People don’t know what to do with us. They depend upon us in times of war. Between wars, we must each find our own place, or take the honorable way out.”

“It’s hard enough for me as a man, in the peacetime army,” Patton went on when they came back together. “I have no idea what advice to give you as a woman. I fear we have no place for you in this civilization, and I mean that as a criticism of the civilization.”

So it was just the kind of mess that Communists loved to argue about in eight-hour meetings. Those deliberations generally ended in deadlocks broken by assertive leaders who used raw power to do whatever they wanted.

“Why did you go to such lengths to ‘kill’ Dawn? And is she truly dead?” Are you who you say you are?

She had been learning that getting respect was a matter of acting like you deserved it while pretending you didn’t care;

Some ribbon-cutting worthy had made a speech to the effect that this fair was all based upon a great theorem—namely, that industry, manufacture, and commerce depended “almost immediately” on the pure sciences.

She raised her sights and looked for higher and grander things that related to the theorem, and found them in plain view, rising above the Midway like colossi erected by scientific pharaohs. Save that unlike the monuments of Egypt these were never meant to endure for more than five months. Unburdened of the requirement to survive even a single Chicago winter, the fantasists—“architects” was probably the wrong word—had diverted all resources normally spent on practical considerations to the true purpose. The names blazoned on them in modern sans-serif letters were Ford, General Motors, Westinghouse, Firestone. She knew what the German Communists were thinking and what the people at the kommunalka would say, which was that this only proved that it was all just a propaganda festival for capitalism. Dawn, who had been raised on propaganda, saw that this was not the entire truth. One could easily imagine going to a party congress in the Soviet Union or a rally in Germany and finding the same buildings celebrating the same things, only the typefaces changed. As much as they might like to believe that they were competing with one another, all were a conjoined program for the theorem.

What he’s trying to say is—nice to meet you, Dawn—that truths come in complementary pairs, and you can’t have one without the other.”

“You know what river this is?” he asked. “The Ural.” “Yes. Still fixated on the flames, he pointed one direction with his left hand. “To this side, Europe.” His right. “Asia. We’re right on the boundary. It’s one of the things that makes us different—culturally, spiritually different—from Europe. I was thinking about it when I was reading Shpak’s report. What you had to say about Chicago and how it was on a similar boundary between the eastern United States—more of a European kind of place, I gather—and the west. A big place. Full of savages and savagery. Making America different too. In a similar way perhaps to Russia.”

Aurora was no closer to understanding what was, and wasn’t, considered bourgeois than she had been when she’d stepped off the boat with Engineer Overstreet in Vladivostok. It seemed that one of the few forces in the world that could rival the power of Marxist-Leninist thought was men’s craving to be respected. And, to be fair, women’s.

Drawing Ordzhonikidze’s eye, Proton said, “It is as if a few scientists discovered a new continent with thousands of hitherto unknown species of butterflies. Catching them all and drawing pictures of them is going to take awhile. But the possibility exists that at least one of them might be a magic butterfly that gives its discoverer powers we thought were reserved to wizards and gods.”

Life was not entirely a crapshoot—there were a few commonsense things you could do to stack the odds in your favor—but as soon as the shooting started, only the most brute, elementary plans were of any use.

It was the first time in a long while—years at least—that she had been alone, moving at will through wild country, and in spite of the bad things she was leaving in her wake and the uncertainty of what was to come, she found that it was like going home.

She was thinking about how a few simple items could transform your experience of the world. How rapidly one could come to expect the conveniences of air travel and warm toilets, how desperately one would long to have them back if they were taken away, the lengths one would go to, to preserve one’s access to them. For all that Beria and his ilk had soldiers, police, and torturers at their beck and call, their ability to give or take mere conveniences must, in the aggregate, confer more power by far.

A car awaited. Warm, engine running—another of those little conveniences people would probably kill to keep, once the Berias of the world had seen fit to dole them out.

The Soviet Union as a whole seemed to divert a lot of its productive capacity into uniforms, badges, and medals. The foreign correspondents hanging around the bar at the Metropol made fun of them for it, then went back to their fleabag hotel rooms to write think pieces about what it all meant. If you couldn’t pay, feed, or house the masses you could at least make them feel like they were part of something by giving them uniforms and awarding them ranks.

It all hinged on what Beria was going to say next. Beria knew as much, and was enjoying the moment. Here was a man who really liked what he did for a living. Aurora ought to have been anxious to the point of hysteria, but after all she’d seen and lived through in the past year she could not bring herself to feel very much. She knew that as long as she lived in this country, within reach of men like these, she’d be dangling above that hole in the ice, the knife on the rope. With a word Beria could kill her. The only point was that he wanted her to know that.

Aurora wondered if Zhirkin knew about Shpak. If Zhirkin was afraid of her. Because that was how it worked. Beria was at the center of a web of people who were all afraid, for good reason, of being killed by the others.

The fact that Proton and all the other aeronauts were dead was never announced, but they did get an excellent funeral. Aurora had now been in the Soviet Union long enough to understand. A big, splashy balloon launch made for excellent, upbeat propaganda. A big funeral made for sad, but still excellent, propaganda. The in-between part—the actual announcement that the balloon had crashed and killed everyone aboard—did not make for such great propaganda and so it was simply omitted. Beyond a certain point you were just expected to know that all of those aeronauts were dead.

“Polostan!” Owen dubbed it, a few moments after he’d climbed out of the car that had brought him and a couple of other Brits down from Moscow. He kept turning his head from side to side trying to estimate the distance separating the goals, which seemed almost to sink beneath the curvature of the Earth. The witticism went untranslated by his interpreter. But the joke was the same in any language. His hosts, mostly high-ranking cavalry officers, didn’t get it. Oh, they understood that he’d slapped the Central Asian suffix “-stan” onto “polo”—that much was obvious—but the whole concept of clever wordplay for its own sake just didn’t belong to their world. Banterers they were not.

would begin to take it seriously once they understood that the women took it seriously. This was surprising. A separation would occur. Men who did not like being surprised—stupid men—would turn away and mutter rude things. Men who rather liked being surprised—and she was pretty sure Owen was one of those—would find in it something to take them out of their ennui.

But at some level even the most selfish and degenerate man knew what was expected of him. You never knew when you were going to be tested. It was what you did in such a moment that told what kind of man you were. He did not make his choice easily or without misgivings. But after those first few moments of uneasy consideration, an alteration came over him that reminded her in some way of the balloon being slowly filled with hydrogen. At first just a flaccid sack, supine on the field, but by the time it was over, inflated and shapely with power.