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 our 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