Газ-Вода
I sat in the cafeteria. No. 2, to be precise, named after Vasilyeev. You remember, Virgin Lands II, in the nineties? No matter. My hair was brown again, a neat job by the make-up folks this afternoon, and looked quite natural. Say what you will about consumer technologies, but anti-aging methods in the Soviet Union are terrific.
My stomach grumbled in spite of itself. They’d fed me this morning, but my plan had required me to skip out on lunch, so here I sat. The bowl of dumplings in front of me smelled delicious. They claimed they were made on-site instead of being re-hydrated this end. I was almost convinced. Certainly, it beat vacuum-packed potatoes and borsch squeezed from a tube. I bit one, completely smothered in butter. Yep, delicious.
Two tables over, a few well-dressed young men in glasses gawked upwards. It’s not that the view wasn’t astounding, but in my line of work I saw better. Frequently. Nonetheless, their reaction was amusing. Probably junior Party officials or even engineers, up for a meeting of young professionals or perhaps a diplomatic event of some sort, I thought. If I’d stayed with my retainers I could have asked about most anything on Noviy Mir, but that was precisely what I wanted to avoid today.
I took another bite of the dumplings. My grandmother used to cook like this, back when you could buy about twelve items at the corner store, before the tech boom and liberalisation in the early aughts. That would have been. . . I hardly remember now. Late Brezhnev, maybe a bit into Gorbachev?
Only three years had past since the Americans had their last hurrah on the Moon when I appeared, squalling, in a regional hospital in Ostankino. I was named Konstantin after my grandfather, but spent half of school pretending I was Gagarin instead. The other boys would tease me about it at Pioneer meetings.
You could actually pick out Moscow through the plate glass above at times. I liked it best at night, when the tracery of the city’s roads stood out like a fuzzy bulls-eye, high-speed rail lines streaking off across the country. Leningrad, Kazan, Kiev, Irkutsk. You’d get maybe three minutes to squint down before the ground spun out of view.
I figured I had perhaps twenty minutes before they noticed I had wandered off. Time enough to eat my dumplings, and more besides. The butter-smeared bowl already stood empty in front of me. Another? I realised I’d better not. Every extra pound of weight was probably tallied and scrutinized by twenty doctors in Baikonur. I stood and crossed the cafeteria, resisting the urge to look about self-consciously. The less I paid attention to other people on the station, the less likely they were to pay attention to me. It’s not easy being famous, even when disguised a bit.
What caught my attention first was the sign. ГАЗ-ВОДА, in cheerful, bold letters on the side of a tiny stand about the size of a Soyuz-10 toilet. I guess you could say I owed a debt to this ancient little place, or rather one just like it. I smiled at the woman behind the counter, probably another twenty years my senior.
“Good day, ma’am. Could I please have a large glass of the apple flavour?”
Moscow in the summer is absolutely sweltering. I got off the metro at VDNKh and walked the rest of the way to the youth centre, white shirt stained with sweat for the hundredth time that same week. I raised a hand to my brow so I could stop squinting for a moment, and I could see the heat rising in waves from the pavement. It made me feel almost sorry for the folks sitting in their cars, traffic stopped as it so often was. Then again, they had cars, so they didn’t need my sympathy.
Finally I decided I’d had enough. I was close, but if I sweated the entire water content of my body out in the next few blocks, then going to the centre would be completely pointless. I slunk towards a stand at the intersection. Mother said that the first ГАЗ-ВОДА stations appeared in Moscow when she was still in university, and I almost believed it from how battered this one looked. Nonetheless, it was water, it was cold, and it was good. A little bubbly, a little sugary, a lot good. “Good day, ma’am,” I greet the woman inside politely. “Could I please have a large glass of the apple flavour?”
I get my water and step aside to sip it. The slight shade the awning of the stand affords is terrific. “I’ll take the same, thank you very much!” I look at the person in front of the window. He smiles back. Looks about my age, pale blond hair and typical blue-grey eyes.
“Dmitriy Lebednikov.” He offers his hand. Strong grip.
“Konstantin Korolyov.” I take another sip.
“Where are you off to?”
“I was planning on heading to the youth centre. A few friends from engineering school and I meet on Saturdays to play tennis,” I explain.
“Oh, which school?” He seems genuinely interested.
“M. Logunov Institute of Engineering and Technology. Mechanical.”
“Isn’t that the cosmonaut school?” he asks innocently. I turn crimson.
His brow creases for a moment as he looks at me. I count two seconds before he flushes slightly in response.
It’s the glasses.
“Oh, pardon me, I didn’t notice, I–”
I cut him off. “It’s fine. I tried to hide it for a while and it didn’t work out. What about you, what’s your job?”
Lebednikov smiled. “I was a pilot for the Army. My family did quite well during liberalisation, so I’m actually looking to be a cosmonaut now, with the expansion of the space programme.”
At this I’m more interested. I clap his shoulder. “You want to come with me to the centre?”
“Why not?” He shrugs.
“Boys!” The stand proprietor turns her attention to us. “Those glasses aren’t free, you know! Quit dawdling!”
I drain my glass and set it back on the counter. “Thank you.” We set off together.
The Earth drifts slowly by below me as I sip my carbonated drink. The station’s spin gives a bit of artificial gravity, and if I look up I can see the other wing of Noviy Mir always overhead as well. “Say,” enquires the woman at the stand, “have we met before?”
“No,” I politely decline.
“Then perhaps you’ve been on television!” She doesn’t use the Web much, does she. . .
“Not a chance. I’m a regional Party official in charge of nuclear power operations.”
“Mmmh.” She turns back to something else.
Dmitriy and I had become friends almost instantly. We shared a love of science fiction and sports, engineering and ingenuity. We were each others’ wingmen, in training and on the street. We were also trouble, just not enough to be an issue. But Dima re-ignited my passion for space because of his boundless curiosity. What was out there?, we’d wonder together, toasting the unknown in his tiny Moscow flat. But most importantly, it was thanks to him that I achieved my dream.
He had mentioned when we met that his family had done well. He neglected to mention how well. His father, Kirill Lebednikov, had made as much of a fortune as one could in the Soviet Union in the nineties. This made all the difference, because he could pay for corrective surgery. Dima convinced him to pay for me. The hated glasses disappeared.
In some ways, the destruction of my eyesight had been my doing. There was a small fault to begin with, but my refusal to wear lenses, coupled with exhaustive studying, exacerbated it. As graduation neared, my eyesight worsened. I flunked the cosmonaut testing completely in the end. Drunk myself into oblivion. Threw up. Lots. Eventually I went home to my parents, who consoled me, but pointed out I had a mechanical engineering degree from one of the best institutes in the country. I took the point and accepted a job locally.
Meeting Dmitriy changed that, and when I re-applied, eyesight restored, they took me instantly. Good political record, some experience in the interim with robotics, and connections. Dima and I spent years together, flew tandem for Soyuz twelve times, before they announced the Mars programme. As a pilot, Dima was selected early on, and was determined to be the best of the best. He wound up in command of the first manned mission to that planet ever.
And then the Molot booster lit up the night like a bright new sun.
I remember hearing the news about Molot-3. I was in Almaty at the time; I’d been given leave to travel there to give a speech to students in the local Kazakh school system. I imagine the accident was mercifully brief. Short-circuit in the booster. A flash. Nobody would have felt a thing, and the debris falling on the steppe contained no remains.
Perhaps thirty years earlier, they’d have covered it up. Radio silence. Post-glasnost, that was impossible. Baikonur drew immense flak. The Minister for the Space Programme too. They handed Dimitriy a Hero of the Soviet Union, posthumously, and called me up to receive it for him.
Those twenty minutes broke my heart. Dima had been training for that mission all his life. He commanded it. He’d have been the first man on Mars. Naming the landing site for his successors Lebednikov Base was no consolation. I wept enough tears for a lifetime then, and not once since.
I don’t like to speak of any of this. On television I’m not allowed. Better to speak of loyalty to Party and State, or the legacy of my grandfather, an engineer in the Great Patriotic War. The spirit of exploration. Mankind’s quest to know. All are acceptable answers, and I have them rehearsed perfectly, to retell and embellish as I smile with perfectly white teeth. After the Mars programme and then the wildly successful Jupiter missions, I’m practically the poster boy for the last twenty years of manned spaceflight. Perhaps not quite the cult sensation Gagarin was, but I’ve done well for myself. My parents agree.
Tonight, however, is the seventy-fifth anniversary of Sputnik. I’m intended to give an address at the banquet, televised live to the whole Soviet Union as well as globally. I suppose I’ll still make it in time. My handlers will throw a fit when they discover I slunk off. It’s not their fault, and I’ll recommend they keep their jobs. But the spirit of exploration isn’t long-winded Party addresses and celebratory toasts. It’s out there.
It’s also in here. Dima understood better than anyone why we fly. He re-convinced me. So I lift my газ-вода to the darkening curve of the planet below in a silent toast.
Man, this glass must be as old as I am!