This is a fan translation of Road to Mars (Дорога к Марсу) by fifteen Russian science fiction writers.
This chapter was written by Sergei Slyusarenko.
I claim no rights to the contents herein.
Note: Footnotes can be found at the end of the chapter.
Chapter 26
The Thin Line of Love
"Don't turn around," Kartashov repeated, emphasizing each syllable with his lips barely moving.
Givens froze, only pressing his head into his shoulders slightly. Kartashov raised his hand slowly and flicked away a huge spider that had somehow appeared on the black man's shoulder.
"The bastard could've bitten you!" Kartashov said in satisfaction.
"Thanks, man!" Givens shook his friend's hand. "Do you smell smoke?"
"It's not smoke! I'd say it's the smell of pizza being cooked on firewood." Kartashov lifted his nose and took a whiff.
"Let's go there." Givens pointed down the hill, where a thin trail snaked between the stones and disappeared into the greenery of the valley.
Jeubin was carefully studying Givens's EKG and couldn't figure out what was bothering him. Everything seemed fine, the man was in a coma, but still, something was off.
All right, this is just paranoia talking, Jean-Pierre thought and started leaving the compartment.
Already touching the bulkhead, the doctor threw a glance at Kartashov's life support systems and had a wild thought.
"Bruno, I need you help," he called Piccirilli on the intercom. "You're off-duty right now, can you give me a hand?"
"No problem," the Italian replied immediately. "The pizza's all done. A little burned, but it's still what we need."
"Grab the EKGs of our patients from the database. Can you compare their spectra?"
"Sure, where are they?"
Jeubin recited the directory path to the medical unit's files from memory. Bruno copied the records of the last two days and was about to take a look at them when the signal calling a crew meeting rang out.
As if it were nothing more than an office meeting, Anikeev casually explained the tasks for the next several hours to the crew. After the passage of Givens's comet, they, first, had to conduct an external inspection of the compartments. Second, it was time to take down the sail (what was left of it); its job was done, and the acceleration was only making their landing on Mars more difficult. That was why the work order had Anikeev and Bull going EVA to inspect and launch the manipulator robot to disassemble the sail, while Jean-Pierre would remain at the infirmary at full readiness, and Bruno would monitor the situation and support them from the main console.
Piccirilli slumped. He'd really wanted to go EVA, but orders were orders.
The EVA preparations went through without any surprises, and, an hour later, Bruno was watching on the screen as two men in clumsy white spacesuits were moving across the surface of the ship. Sitting there at the main console alone, he suddenly felt the warm wave of nostalgic melancholy roll over him.
"Incredible," Anikeev was doing his best to comment his every step. "We went through pretty much the entire comet, and there's not even a scratch here…"
Bruno had been born in a tiny town in central Italy called Recanati. The birthplace of the great Leopardi. A medieval town with a civic tower, a cobblestone town square, a monthly antique fair on it, and with people who'd known one another for generations. Life there flowed to slowly and lightly that it seemed as if there wasn't any outside world beyond the city wall, no 21st century.
"Bruno, what time is it?" Anikeev asked suddenly.
"Eleven-thirty in Rome," the Italian replied immediately.
"This Omega of mine isn't working right. Keep giving us these reference points, so we can keep track of everything. I don't think we'll need the burner, I'm not seeing any damage."
The word "burner" triggered one of the scariest memories of Bruno's childhood: the explosion in the home of Renato who'd lived across the street from him. Signora Maria, the owner of a small shop where Bruno would buy bread on Tuesdays and Thursdays, told him that the Christmas fire that killed Renato Barzocini's parents hadn't been an accident. Renato loved his aging parents very much but intentionally cut the hose on the heater's gas burner after learning they were planning on staying with their son after Christmas for good instead of returning home. Maybe Maria had made it all up because Renato kept arguing with her over parking.
"The sky here is incredible," Bull couldn't hold back his emotions.
"Eleven-forty," Bruno informed them. "Finish up the inspection, start checking the handle."
"I'm there now."
The school Bruno went to hadn't been repaired in four hundred years, at least in the words of the principal. The handle on the front door was ancient, as if dating back to the Renaissance. The bronze lion head seemed to be ready to bite every entering schoolkid. After the classes ended, it took Bruno two minutes to run home. The Verzelli Alley, so narrow that two Fiat Cinquecentos couldn't get past one another on it, would greet him with the smells of rosemary and laundry drying overhead. Bruno's parents' house was hidden in the fortress wall, narrow and tall, nearly three stories. More than anything, Bruno loved the terrace that covered the entire roof. During summer, it would get so hot that his feet felt as if they were on a frying pan. But at night, when a myriad stars lit up in the clear sky, Bruno would spend the night on the terrace looking at the stars and the sea that, if the Moon was shining, gleamed with a narrow strip in the distance. If he spent a long time staring at the night sky, then he began to feel as if he was alone in the world, alone with the stars.
"Bruno, turn on the manipulator and prepare the halyard tension data. I'm going to check the manipulator attachment, I don't like the look of this nut. Or bolt. Whatever it is…" Anikeev said casually.
"Preparing."
Piccirilli glanced at the next screen over and remembered Jeubin's request. Without looking away from the main screen, he initiated the spectral analysis program. The program was supposed to find matching harmonics in the entire EKG data array.
Giovanni Lorini had been the town's idiot. Well, not quite an idiot. He was in his thirties, always walked around in a black wide-brimmed hat and a loose cloak that always gave him a romantic look. He called himself a painter, but no one had ever seen any of his paintings, despite the fact that Giovanni left his house with an easel every day. When Bruno first bought wine from Maria in order to celebrate graduation with his friends, she told him that it was all because of a woman. Liana had rejected Giovanni, so he started drinking and went mad. "Sometimes he drinks two bottles a day!" Maria would say in horror. And when Giovanni passed out drunk at the bar, his father would come to get him. He would show up in a silver Rolls-Royce, an expensive coat, and a snow-white scarf on his neck. Giovanni's father was a very rich man who loved his son.
The mantis-like long arm of the manipulator extended and folded again. Bruno was testing out its range with the short jerks of the joystick.
"The system is ready, you can activate the winches."
"Bruno, why don't you test it out away from the shielding?" the Commander asked.
"I can't see it, and I'd rather not turn the camera from you. Take over the controls. We can test it then."
"Understood," the American replied.
The processor beeped, indicating the completion of the EKG analysis.
"Jean-Pierre, tell me," Bruno called the infirmary, "how similar are the EKGs of different people?"
"Well, they do match in some places on occasion."
"Take a look at these pulses." Bruno sent the file to the doctor.
"Oh, merde," Jeubin said, looking at the spectra.
"Commander, twelve-oh-seven," Bruno switched to the EVA team's channel.
"Understood, the manipulator is green, prepare to roll up the sail."
They had an antique fair every month on the square in front of the municipality building, at the foot of the statue to Leopardi. It had everything. From old forged nails to antique furniture, from clay crafts to thin silver trinkets, from simple student watercolors to Renaissance-era paintings. Bruno had once seen the hands of Don Igini, the most important and respected man in town, start to shake upon seeing some dark painting. Don Igini gripped the nondescript daub like a spider and, it seemed, had tripled its price with that gesture alone. Without haggling, he wrote out a check, and the Don's checks were always trusted, before reverently accepting the painting from the hands of the pleased seller. He could imagine how the seller would be later tearing out his own hair after reading about the discovery of a previously-unknown Da Vinci sketch in the paper.
But Bruno had his own interests. Back then, he'd been collecting stamps. More than anything, he wanted Soviet stamps, ones depicting space pioneers. Maybe that was when he'd first started thinking that the sky was where he belonged. Once, at a flea market, Bruno saw a silver spaceship. Tiny, smaller than a pinky finger, but made with such grace and skill that as soon as Bruno picked it up, he knew that it was his talisman for life. He always carried the ship in his pocket, in a lipstick case, the way the old man at the market had sold it to him. That vendor had been an odd one. Spoke with a heavy accent and said that the toy came from Mars, brought by his grandfather, an engineer working for Lossef. But he'd sold it to him for only half a euro. Then again, all the vendors at that market were a little out of this world.
"Bruno, both of them have identical and utterly atypical rhythms. These are harmonics are uncharacteristic of a human EKG," Jean-Pierre was worried.
"And?"
"More than likely, right now, they're seeing identical dreams out there, beyond the bounds of consciousness. I'm afraid of even imagining which ones."
"Are you sure the machine's not mistaken?" Bruno was watching the primary monitor without looking away but still managed to converse with the doctor.
"Of course! They're electrodes connected to the CPU through the analog signal reader. I don't have a device, it's all integrated," Jeubin said in surprise.
"Integrated, you say?" Piccirilli spoke thoughtfully.
When Bruno turned fourteen, he, as per the custom, had been given his first motor scooter. That very night, after riding proudly through Porta Marina, the northern gate of the town wall, the biggest and most beautiful of them all, passed through Piazzale Europa, where teenagers gathered each night, and gave a ride to Alessandra for the first time.
Four years later, this time on the powerful Honda Shadow his parents had given him when he got accepted into university, he was speeding along Corso Adriatico. In the foam of the raging sea, feeling Alessandra pressing her chest against his back, he suddenly realized he was happy.
The youngest student at the university, having graduated school three years early, and also not a nerdy runt but a young athlete with a bronze tan, Bruno loved the sea, and, as soon as the season started, he and his friends could always be found on the beaches of Marcelli. Pleasant company, a glass of wine, panino con la porchetta — what else did one need to relax after a lecture? Stupefied by the sea, the sun, and love, Bruno and Alessandra would spend the evenings lying in the sand and listening to the rumbling of the sea. Once, staring up at the sky, Bruno, just like that time as a kid, suddenly felt the urgent call of the stars. Only now they seemed far closer to him. Alessandra, also enchanted by the stars, whispered, "Show me your spaceship again."
Then, looking at him in the ghostly light of the Moon, she spoke, "It feels as if, far away, on some Red Planet, a girl is standing and calling someone… And her voice, the voice of love, eternity, the voice of longing, is flying through the entire universe, calling out."
Bruno smiled. Alessandra was an even bigger romantic than he was. Then again, it hadn't stopped her from marrying Don Igini's grandson two months after Bruno went to Accademia Aeronautica in Naples. She was perfectly satisfied with the role of a provincial star. Few back then had understood Bruno's decision to devote himself to science instead of accepting the prestigious and highly paid job at an engineering firm.
"Attention," came Anikeev's stern voice, "we're starting to roll up the sail. Bruno, how much time do we have?"
"About two hours' worth of oxygen. Let me check the radiation levels. Three hours easy, as long as you don't get close to the edge of the shadow. Have to remember the diffraction at the edge."
The town's main church, Chiesa di San Vito, was located next to Bruno's home. Bruno had once thrown snowballs with his friends on the square in front of the church during a sudden snowfall in March. Sometimes, before holidays, his entire school would attend the mass. Once, when he had to sing the psalms, Bruno forgot the words and, to keep Maestra Anna-Rosa from noticing and publicly rebuking him, sang the first thing that came to his mind, "Ma dimmi tu dove sará dové la strada per le stelle." [Footnote 1]
He'd been very little then, and it seemed as if the stars were so easy to get to. But his pragmatic friends and classmates had laughed at him. And so, Bruno grew up a provincial wolf cub, whose soul was reaching out for the sky.
"Why don't you shut off the electrodes?" Bruno asked the doctor.
"What do you mean?" Jeubin was confused.
"Shut off the electrodes completely from one of the patients. Let's say, Kartashov," Piccirilli explained.
"Shutting off," the Frenchman replied tersely. Then he shouted, "The signal is still there! The part that completely matches Givens's!"
"Shut off Givens."
"God, those signals were being directly sent to their brains. What is that?"
"It's coming from within our primary CPU," Bruno said and immediately switched to the Commander. "Andrei, we've picked up anomalies in our primary CPU. Try to speed up the procedure, I'm worried about a serious malfunction."
"What malfunction, Bruno? Everything is fine here. All right, raise the winch speed to maximum, the halyards seem to be straight."
Bruno boosted the power to the winches that were rolling in the lines holding the sails. The screens were already showing the huge canvas getting closer to the ship.
"Moving well!" Bull commented, "like… bleep."
"Did you just censor yourself?"
"No, I don't know any Russian swear words."
"Liar."
"Look, Commander." Bruno had impatiently waited for Anikeev and Bull to get changed and reach the cockpit. "Something or someone was directly invading the minds of our friends."
"I can confirm that," Jeubin's voice came from the speaker. "After I removed the electrodes, Givens returned back to normal."
Anikeev listened to Bruno's detailed report.
"What are you suggestions?" He looked at up at his friends.
"I think the problem is in Storage 2. I've already ran through the CPU registers, and their operation has been partially intercepted. The hacker is entering the network from the storage module, physically plugging into the bus. That's why we can't open the lock."
"Bruno, how much time do you need to break the lock?" Anikeev asked.
"Commander, first I'm going to try to unlock the surveillance cameras."
"Well, that's crap right there!" he said a minute later.
As if in a trance, the Italian was looking at the monitor that was showing the contents of the second storage module. Suddenly, Bruno leapt up as if electrocuted. The lipstick case in his breast pocket was vibrating. Piccirilli, jerking in surprise, pulled it out and shook the silver starship onto his palm. The starship was quivering. Its ruby portholes were glowing with a hypnotic light.
The descent didn't take a long time, and, when the two finally stepped on the emerald grass, they saw several people come out to them from a small grove. They were aggressive looking, holding unusual objects that looked like weapons at the ready.
"Just don't make any sudden moves," Kartashov said quietly.
Givens followed his friend's recommendation and froze in place.
A sharp metal object that turned out to be the tip of an equally metal rod was swaying about half a meter in front of him. Another such objects that looked like human spears could be seen on both sides some distance away. Along with them, Givens could make out the owners of the "spears," people in black tunics that were looking at the spacers without a word. The people (outwardly, they looked no different from humans) turned out to be very well developed physically: tall with powerful biceps. In addition to a "spear," one of them was also holding the stone head of Nefertiti, clearly picked up from the boat.
The silence lasted a minute… then another… and another… finally, Kartashov decided to try.
"Greetings!" he said in as dispassionate a tone as possible. "We're not here of our own volition and bear you no ill will. Do you understand?"
The people in tunics didn't reply.
"Let me try in English," Givens whispered.
"Thanks, I can do it, I'm the ship's first contact specialist, after all," Kartashov reminded him. Then he repeated his words in the official UN languages. The result was the same.
"I know some Hausa too," Givens butted in again. "Been looking for my roots, so I learned the language."
"Where is it spoken?" Kartashov inquired.
"Nigeria."
"All right, give it a try."
Givens's words produced an unexpected effect. The warrior holding Nefertiti's head stuffed his "spear" under his arm, stepped closer to Edward, and handed him the stone object. Givens accepted the head with both hands and pressed it to his chest. Then the warrior patted him on the shoulder and indicated a direction a little to the side of the cliff with his hand. A hard-to-spot trail was snaking along the slope, disappearing between the stones.
"Is that where we should go?" Kartashov asked. "Edward, ask them something in Nigerian!"
But that was too much. The warrior who'd handed Givens the stone head stepped back, grabbed his "spear" in a combat grip, and started to move the tip in the air next to the spacers with clear intent, as if pushing them towards the trail.
"Not going to argue," Givens said hurriedly. "On our way."
Then he repeated the words in Hausa.
Descending the trail turned out to be not at all like a light afternoon walk. Large red boulders kept blocking their way, towering from all sides and completely hiding the path. In such cases, the warriors following Kartashov and Givens would graciously use the tips of their "spears" to indicate where to climb next.
Forcing the stone obstacles was even more difficult for Givens, who was still holding Nefertiti's head. Half an hour after they'd begun their descent, it happened: while climbing up a slippery boulder, Edward threw his hands up to catch his balance, and the stone head flew into the abyss. But before he could even yelp, something else unexpected happened: after falling no more than five meters, Nefertiti vanished as if it hadn't been there.
"Did you see that?!" Givens addressed Kartashov with an excited whisper.
Andrei, who'd been walking in front and studying the trail carefully, didn't reply right away.
"No. What happened?"
"I dropped the head into the pit, but it disappeared. I think it ended up in my hallucination and is now lying somewhere in the ship's corridor. If we jump, we'll probably end up there too."
Kartashov paused and turned to Givens, who walked up close to him. The warriors with "spears" lagged behind a little. They weren't in a hurry, and there was no way to escape from the trail.
"I'm not sure I'd end up in your hallucination," Kartashov said clearly. "Even when you thought I was on the ship, I didn't see it. If we jump, maybe you'll think that I'm with you, but I'm worried about falling to my death in my own perception. Don't think that I'm afraid, I'm just trying to think logically. After all, if I'm only alive right now because of an artificial coma, then it wouldn't be the right decision to try to come out of it."
After these words, Givens suddenly felt that he himself might not have the guts to do what he'd suggested. He threw a glance at the drop. The greenery-covered valley was now noticeably closer, allowing him to make out individual plants, and yet the fall would still be fatal. He turned to look back and saw the that warriors were already near and had even raised their "spears" to let the spacers know that they shouldn't linger.
Then, feeling a wave of desperation roll over him and yelping hoarsely, Edward Givens Jr. took two quick steps to the edge, pushed off the boulder, and jumped.
Footnotes
1) Lyrics to the song "Anna e Marco" by Italian singer Lucio Dalla. Translates as "Can you tell me where is the road to the stars."