For the most part, the crew ignored him as he passed them sanding down the hallways. He could not read their expressions beneath their ventilator masks, but he imagined that they regarded him like a feral dog that they must tolerate but might eventually have to put out of its misery. One day he, too, would be sanded away.
Only the second mate, Ivan Kovalyov, took a liking to him. Ivan had the face of a baby and the body of a wrestler. He was also missing his left pinkie. He was originally from Vanavara, a tiny town in the middle of Siberia on the banks of the Podkamennaya Tunguska River. He was the only man on the ship, besides Lars and himself, who did not drink.
“Where I come from, if you don’t take vodka. . well, this is actually worse than homosexual,” said Ivan. “I am outcast, you see. I am lamb.”
His only vice, he claimed, was music, but he pronounced this word as if it had an extra, secret syllable that only he knew about: myoo-zi-ka.
“When I was little, I spent all of my monies on compact discs,” he said. “Grigor and I would drive down to Krasnoyarsk and get all of the latest hits. Like Crash Test Dummies or Midnight Oil. These bands, I truly love. They are like family. Like fathers. Like my sisters.
“Once there was this kid, who gets into an accident and he couldn’t go to school,” he sang. He shook his head. “That is so beautiful and also so true.”
When he was not on watch, Ivan would sit against the bulwark of the poop deck and strum his battered guitar. He had discovered a specific spot where the acoustics caused the music to drift down into the ventilators and naturally amplify throughout the corridors of the ship so that you could hear him playing all the way down in Moby-Dikt. Ivan had a surprising number of original love songs in his repertoire. They were named after different women (“Nadja,” “Carolina,” “Julie Julie”), and they all sounded exactly alike.
“I have only four fingers,” he explained, holding up his hand. “So I must play simple songs.” He strummed a chord, as if to demonstrate. “Ooo-ooo-ooo, and her name was Nadja.”
“Have you met all of these women?” Radar asked Ivan.
“Not yet,” said Ivan. “Ooo-ooo-ooo, and her name was Oleana.”
But Ivan did not get many chances to play his songs, because Ivan’s true gift was in celestial navigation. Ivan could read the stars in his sleep, and thus he was always in demand on the bridge. Captain Daneri — who otherwise thought little of his “Red Army,” as he called the Russian crew — confirmed the astonishing nature of Ivan’s astral gifts:
“He’s the best I’ve ever seen. Sweet Jesus, that boy was born in the sky,” he said.
Radar greatly enjoyed watching Ivan shoot the heavens with his sextant. The indexing arm slid across the arc, the mirror clicked into place, and the course was confirmed.
“And what is that one?” Radar said from the deck one night. He was pointing at a star glowing just off their bow.
“That is Sirrah. It looks like one star, but she is actually two stars very close together, like this. Very close, so from ninety-seven light-years away, we see only one star. But you have to remember, you are seeing past right now. You are seeing very old light. Ninety-seven years old. So this light is from before World War I, when people still poop in holes,” he said. “I always like Sirrah. She is beautiful because she is in two constellations at once. She is head of Andromeda and she is also penis of Pegasus. She is both. One day, I will write song about this.”
Rarely did an exchange go by with Ivan that did not end in this phrase.
To really see Ivan at work, however, you needed to observe him in the chart room, with its drawers and drawers of maps covering nearly every coastline in the world. This was his true domain. Ivan spun his plotters in great pirouettes, cutting lines with his red pencil, tapping and wrapping the dividers across the great expanse of depth readings. All he needed was a single star and he could take you anywhere you wanted. The Aleph was equipped with various radar and GPS locating devices, but the electrical work was shoddy and sometimes the systems would fizzle out with no apparent warning, leaving them seemingly without a location. But with Ivan, there was no worry. With Ivan, they would always have a location, because Ivan did not fail.
“How did you learn how to read the stars?” Radar asked him at dinner one evening.
“You must understand that in Soviet Union we didn’t have very many things. But one thing we have more than anyone is space. I mean like literally outer space. Our space program was best in the world. We did not fake moon landing like the Americans. We send up Sputnik first and we send up Laika, first dog into space. And then we send up Yuri Gagarin, first man in space. After this, everyone believed anything is possible. So of course I wanted to be a cosmonaut when I was little. Just like every other Russian boy.”
“I’m not sure the Americans faked the moon landing.”
“Of course they did. That is common fact,” said Ivan, chewing thoughtfully on a forkful of mashed potatoes. “But probably real reason I became interested in stars is because of the event.”
“The event?”
“I think this is what you call it in English.”
“What event?”
“Tunguska Event. In 1908, there was huge explosion in Siberia. It blew out two thousand square meters of forest, something like this. Eighty million trees destroyed. Center of explosion was seventy kilometers from Vanavara, but the people there, they still felt heat blast all across their skin. The shockwave broke windows, collapsed woodsheds. It blew the men right off their horse. It was powerful, so powerful. Stronger than an atom bomb.”
“This was 1908?”
“Yes, 1908. In June. There is a monument in Vanavara, because after this everyone wanted to come to see what happened. Scientists, tourists, acrobats.”
“Acrobats?”
“Okay, one acrobat. But he was very famous. He did his Tunguska show, where he launched himself from a wire and disappeared into a puff of smoke. It was very famous and very beautiful.”
“So what caused the explosion?”
“Well, that is a lot of debating. When I was little, government report said this was meteor, but many older people who are still religious could not believe this. They said it was God’s doing. They said the government had made God angry by mistreating its people and so God is punishing them. I can still remember this. . There was line of scientists giving their report. They were standing in these white coats. And I said to myself, Ivan, if you cannot be cosmonaut, maybe you can become scientist like these men. These men know about everything in sky. Look how clean their coats are! They are so powerful and so clean. This is what I thought. So I get books and I get chart and I get spotter and. . I spend time with sky. I spend lots of time with sky. Just watching. In Siberia, sky is amazing. Maybe best sky in world. Like fish eye spinning around and around. You can see stars shoot once every ten seconds, no problem. You look straight ahead and you see more stars in your — how do you call it, on these sides?”
“Your periphery.”
“Yes, your periphery. Your periphery is having serious party. And when you look there, you see more stars over there, and so on. But funny thing is that when I was looking at stars, it was like looking at myself. At my own hand, but this hand I forget I have. It was like. . I have to learn this part of me again.”