“I have lately been thinking that while I gave them a choice, I never asked if it was what they wanted. I have spent the better part of my own life making choices that are contrary to my wants.”
“Leonid also told me that you apologized to him.”
“I won’t lie to you now. I’ve done no such thing.”
“He said he didn’t think you knew that your apology reached him. He said that you must have come into the radio room one night when he was out of range. As his orbit brought him over Star City, he heard the ghost of your voice, saying ‘I’m sorry’ over and over, the sound growing stronger with each repetition. When the signal was finally strong enough for him to answer, you were gone, and Mars greeted him instead.”
The Chief Designer recalled that sleepless night. It was only a few days after Nadya and Leonid ran away. He had woken from nightmares. Not an uncommon occurrence, but usually they took him back to the long-ago past, to icy nights on the tundra. This one was set in the present. He was surrounded by everyone he knew: Nadya, Leonid, Mars, Yuri, Valentina, his wife, his son, Mishin, Bushuyev, Giorgi, Nedelin, Tsiolkovski, Khrushchev, Ignatius, even the General Designer. They were all there to congratulate the Chief Designer, but as he thanked them they each burst into flame. The fire consumed them slowly. They did not change to look like Giorgi’s body, brittle and blackened. Instead they evaporated, from foot to face, a layer at a time like the heat shield. They kept congratulating him, heaping up the most effusive praise, until their mouths were finally consumed. Nadya was the last one to disappear. The Chief Designer stood in the middle of beige, endless terrain, like Baikonur but lacking even the few features that made up that dull landscape. He felt himself on fire. First his teeth disappeared from his mouth. That was when he woke, a feeling he could not identify clenched in both his gut and his mind. He felt near panicked that there was something he had forgotten to do. Something essential. He cried. He had not cried, not really, since he was a boy. Shrugging on his robe and stepping into a pair of old shoes he used as slippers, he went to the radio room. He had not planned to go there, it just happened. It was as if he were still asleep, still in part of the dream. Until now, he was not entirely sure that he had not been dreaming the whole time.
“What did you say to each other?” asked the Chief Designer.
“What is there to say? He’s a stranger now. Do you ever stop to consider how many strangers share your name?”
“It’s not so rare a name.”
“Perhaps that’s why a title is better.”
“So you came back to discuss names and titles?”
“Honestly, Chief Designer, it wasn’t me who came back. It was Nadya. I simply followed. She wants to fly the mission. And don’t think that I didn’t try to talk her out of it.”
There was a report on the new ablative heat shield on the desk. The Chief Designer turned the pages without reading them, without even looking.
“Things might have been better if you could have convinced her.”
“That’s how your spaceships work, right?”
“What do you mean?”
“The things fly themselves, and the cosmonaut’s just a passive passenger.”
“Yes.” The Chief Designer smiled.
“It turns out that I never learned what to do when given the controls. I only end up where I’m guided.”
“You know, sometimes I envy you that.”
“No, you don’t.”
Leonid stood, knocking the chair back several inches.
“My brother told me the details of the next mission. A docking in space. Can’t you try to save him instead of the dogs?”
“His Vostok has no docking clamp. Even if we could meet it in space, the best we could do would be to bounce the two capsules against each other like billiard balls.” The Chief Designer wondered who had told the other Leonid about the mission. It must have been Mars, but that didn’t really answer the question. Who told Mars? Not that it mattered. The Chief Designer was too used to the truth slipping out.
“I know,” said Leonid.
“Then why did you ask?”
“I guess I hoped that you’d surprise me.”
“Did I?”
“Yes and no. How soon until the launch?”
“Two weeks.”
“Have I ever told you the story of the man my village was named after?”
“I know of the man, of course. He’s celebrated in Russian history, as well. But tell me.”
“Bohdan Zinoviy Mykhaylovych Khmelnytsky had crushed the Poles in battle after battle. Starting at the mouth of the Dnieper, where he had once returned to Ukrainian soil after years of slavery, he overthrew the Zaporozhian Sich, and then moved upstream, taking Dnepropetrovsk and Kremenchuk and Cherkasy all the way to Kiev. He was welcomed to the capital on Christmas Day, his procession the grandest parade in the city’s history. Streets were strung across with garlands and every window burned with candles and bands interspersed themselves with the soldiers, playing the kind of joyous songs as had not been heard in Kiev for a hundred years. Parents offered their sons to Khmelnytsky that he might raise them to be great men.
“At a gathering of Cossack nobles, such as a Cossack might be accused of nobility, Khmelnytsky claimed not just the right to rule the Zaporozhian Cossacks but the whole of Ukraine. He became in fact, if not in name, ruler of what would become our nation. From untried soldier to slave to officer to king, somehow he’d not only survived his trials but used them to shape himself into the man of the moment, a hero and a savior. His battles weren’t over, no. The Poles didn’t much care for him and attacked at every opportunity, but Khmelnytsky always prevailed. Maybe the best measure of his greatness is that his successors could not hold Ukraine together.”
“A great man, yes,” said the Chief Designer.
“Grandmother always shared his stories with us, but she left out part of his life. I wouldn’t learn of it until much later, in a book Giorgi leant me. I believe it was a book he shouldn’t have had in the first place, certainly not one that had been approved by Glavlit. It made me realize that Grandmother’s stories were just that: stories. In fact, Khmelnytsky had as many failures as successes. More than that, he had as many moments of cruelty as he did of glory.
“The worst was his hatred of the Jews. He blamed them for every ill that befell him, as if they were the disorganized armies of his subordinates or the ones issuing secret orders to the Poles. During his reign, tens of thousands of Jews were slaughtered. Women, men, children, the elderly. Entire villages disappeared in the wake of Cossack forces, the landscape dotted with charred buildings and mass graves, if the Cossacks even took the time to bury the dead. In some places, there were later found piles of bones, marked with the teeth of the animals that had gnawed away the flesh. And the ways the Jews were slaughtered. Dismemberment, burning, torture, even crucifixion. Any terrible death that man has ever imagined was employed against them. The lucky ones were simply stabbed. In this, Khmelnytsky was as bad as Stalin or Hitler.”
“I didn’t know that about him. The Soviet accounts are sterilized, of course.”
“I stopped revering him after I read that book. And Tsiolkovski, while he may be addled by old age, I think it merely reveals the spite that was always in his heart. A hero is a fragile thing. In the case of the cosmonauts, it took two each for every hero you created. That’s what I learned while I was away. I don’t forgive you, Chief Designer. That’s not required, though, as long as I know what I know now. There’s evil in the world, but its face isn’t yours, Chief Designer. No, it’s not yours at all.”