Insistence of Vision (13 page)

HOW WE’LL ENDURE

(Tales of the Coss Domination)

ᚖ

The Logs

ᚖ

At first, during the early months of exile, I seethed with resentment. Our mother had no business yanking us from Moscow, no matter how painful the city had become. Wasn’t it bad enough, with our father declared an Enemy of the Czar? Denounced by People, Coss and State? How
could
she thereupon haul her daughters along, like huddled gypsies, following the slender rails to a stark and snowy place. To a community of self-banished outcasts, encamped within distant sight of the prison-gulag where father (according to bribed hints) was held.

My sister, Yelena, and I learned from the oldest schoolmaster -
suffering
- how to endure the way that only Russians can.
The bare and diminished winter sun had little strength to warm our adolescent flesh. But
cold
possessed power to penetrate, sinking razor teeth through every bundled layer that we wore.

There we joined work crews of the semi free, who trimmed giant-boled trees and harnessed them behind grunting beasts who puffed, snorted and vented steam as they dug into icy dust, hauling treasure toward the rails.

Each evening, when our shifts came to an end, mother made sure that Yelena and I smoked our weed and opened books, consuming lessons, as if our futures still held promise of reward. Study was hard, as we struggled to concentrate past a fog of fatigue, and despite nearby wails of mourning. For it was a rare day that passed without at least one casualty, one frozen corpse, or several, carried away from our bivouac of the nominally “free.”

What kind of mother – I mused angrily while rubbing Yelena’s feet and inhaling fumes while she read aloud – what kind of mother would voluntarily drag her offspring to a place like this? When the Czar had made a standing offer to the blood relatives of political prisoners – to work off guilt-by-association in greater comfort, close to home?

“Comfort, but also
time,”
she told me, on one of the rare occasions when mother explained anything at all. “The Czar and Cossacks live by a code. If we survive and pay our fines, then you and your sister can never again be charged for being related to traitors. Other crimes, perhaps. But not that.”

I thought about it while spending my free hour as I normally did – earning a couple of added kopeks by working in the stables. Mucking out the stalls of draft animals and grooming their thick, avid fur. Yelena liked to hang around the elepents, but they seemed too dour and moody for me. I much preferred the mammuts – phlegmatic and accepting. So I worked that side of the dank, musty barn, polishing their gleaming tusks and brushing their immense grinding teeth.

“Yesh... yesh, Sasha... ve - vehind dat one... yesh...,” crooned the one called Big Bennie, who wrapped his trunk around my left arm and drew me so close that I felt enveloped by his breath, a sweetly foul blend of alfalfa and stomach juices. Reaching in to scrape a back molar, I knew at any moment he could nip off my head with a single crunch, and the overseers would barely shrug. But I wasn’t afraid. Bennie took his meals in liquid form. And those diamond-hard teeth were not for eating.

I wiped the air-tight seals and nictitating membranes covering his beady eyes and finished by rubbing floppy ears that would expand and swivel during long stretches on the snow, as he sensed the heft and momentum of great tree-hauling sleds or detected the speedy passage of pebbles, a thousand meters away. At last, Bennie’s trunk reached into a pouch and pulled out a five kopek coin that glittered next to the freshly waxed sheen of his tusk. I made my appreciation known. At this rate, I might earn liberty in mere years.

A low groaning arose from the opposite end of the vast chamber, beginning deep, at or below the hearing range of mere humans. I grimaced as the mammuts let out trumpetings of desultory complaint. Perfunctory, because nothing would prevent that basso rumble from growing, coalescing as a dozen bull elepents joined in, finding their interlaced rhythms, reiterating reflections off the walls and climbing toward crescendo.

Their evening dirge of longing did not bother me – at least not as much as it did some humans – hence the reason why this plum job was available to a mere kid. And the mammuts’ complaints soon tapered away, muffled in grudging respect, leaving the soundscape for elepents to occupy, alone.

Yelena, my sweet sister, barely fourteen, did not have to endure. Rather, she grinned in delight, dancing lightly on her toe-tips, like the ballerina she once dreamt of becoming, turning with arms stretched, as if luxuriating in the sonic waves. Around her, bull elepents wafted their long, armored trunks, waggling the fingerlike tips, modulating what soon became a brass ensemble of trombones, coronets and growling tubas.

Lingering effects of Learning Weed still wafted in my nostrils, sinuses and brain, reinforcing knowledge-engrams that had come through conscious reading and unconscious pulsations, just an hour before. I now pictured the barn as a
resonant cavity,
within which
reinforcing waves
added and multiplied, like the photons in a laser beam. A queerly obvious insight, now that I could picture what – only yesterday – had been a bizarre mystery.

Not for the first time I wondered:
what was I beforehand... before tonight’s lesson? Too stupid to see or hear?

And what will be stupidly opaque to me tomorrow, that I’ll understand the day after?

Long, prehensile tails whipped the air while each pachyderm flexed his four, squat legs, ending in hands that shoved against the straw-covered floor, raising the heavy beasts upon stubby but powerful grip-fingers, rising and falling as they sang. Well, that wasn’t much of a feat, given where in the universe they stood. Still, the push-ups
looked
impressive. The nearest male massed several tons, most of it packed within a massive globe of grayish flesh. Hairless, unlike the mammuts. And the elepents’ radar ears were fully erect, all turned in unison, facing the same direction.

Toward the gleaming opal of Earth’s moon. Sensed, if not seen. The paradise of their desirings, where crystal forests gleamed and matriarchal herds roamed, ready to welcome home a few – just a few – of those bulls who proved themselves worthy.

No wonder Yelena liked elepents.

“You should too, Sasha!” she once said. “They are much like us. Like you and me. Sad exiles, dreaming of home.”

Only, that was the problem. Elepents were
too much
like us. All considered, I preferred the simple, cheerful mammuts.

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Mother always fussed, when we dressed to go outside, checking our layers and gloves and mufflers, our
gobnodabi
boots and
ushanka
head coverings, taking special care over Yelena’s buttons. As teenagers do, we hissed and complained, even – especially – when she found something amiss.

“I’m almost a grownup!” Yelena griped. “If we had stayed home I’d be getting ready for
Quinceanera!”

The Czar and his royal cossins had taken a liking to that Spanish custom, encouraging it to be shared all over Earth. A rite of budding womanhood while still innocent. The Coss had a soft spot for traditions like that.

Except that, for the crime of having been sired by a traitor, Yelena’s party would have been a sadly truncated affair, in some local resettlement work town close to Moscow, say in Siberia. Near the bright lights, but tormentingly so. Might it be better to delay? To return home strong, no longer innocent, but free?

Was I starting to understand mother’s reasons?

No! I shook my head, taking my sister’s hand and heading for our adolescent work team, accepting a silent duty from our mother to watch over her. I would do as I was bid. But I refused to accept. This was wrong. The reasons – though growing plainer to me – weren’t good enough.

It would take more than this to forgive her.

I checked Yelena’s scarf, gloves, boots, coverall and headgear once again.

“But we already –”

“Stop fidgeting, Yelena Nikolaevna Bushyeva!” I hissed, using formality to emphasize my seriousness.

She grumbled.

“Mammut-loving
nerdoon.”

“Oh, so? What a blessing, if
only
I farted powerfully and often, like a nerdoon! I would need no propulsion.”

My response made her giggle and Yelena settled down till I finished the inspection.

“Come my little friend-of-elepents. If we are late, we’ll be demoted to
zolotor
duty
.”
To cleaning outhouses.

Together, we wriggled through the hut’s exit, a curtain of ten thousand beaded strands that seemed to caress us, probing, pressing and grabbing up each stray glop of air as we forged ahead...

...to step onto the surface of an asteroid. The snow-covered work camp that was our home.

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The overseer shouted hoarsely. “Put yer backs into it! These logs won’t move themselves!”

His words, in fact, were more restrained than normal – with none of his usual Ukrainian profanity, aimed at mostly-Russian work crews – but today’s
tone
seemed much more tense, almost frantic. And I realized, while speeding up my pace, that he had reason. A sleek little space coupe hovered nearby, amid the brittle-bright stars. Few in the Solar System could afford such a craft, except members of the master race. Perhaps it was even the Coss owner of this giant farm, dropping by for an inspection tour.

Accidents happen, when you’re in a hurry. So I watched Yelena out the corner of one eye, while we hacked at this morning’s fall of freshly-harvested crystalwood trees, with spiral branches girdling each massive trunk. The stems – each the size of many men – had to be removed, but one misjudged cut with your laser axe could lop off a person’s arm, instead of the intended target. We agile adolescents had to be efficient, removing branches and stacking the broad, photocrystalline leaves, while adults lashed cables round the main bole, so that mammuts – grunting even in this minute gravity – might haul the massive, stripped-down trunks toward a waiting freight train.

Always, there was the pressure of expectation. Above our heads, elepents were on their way. Clutching yet more freshly harvested trees with their five strong limbs and tail. Maneuvering them to fall upon our planetoid lumberyard at a steady pace, whether room had been cleared for them or not. Then each elepent would jet back across a hundred klicks of sterile vacuum to fetch more, from the far-bigger, forested asteroid
frederikpohl 6523.
..

... a place far worse than our mere hell-hole. The gulag where mother thought – or fervently believed – her husband had been sent...

...where a vast thicket of vacuum-bred vegetation spread broad antenna-leaves to suck light from the distant sun, while roots sank deep into carbonaceous rock four billion years old, sucking and refining every element that man or Coss desired.

The overseer had reason to be nervous. He supervised a dozen work crews, all of them hampered by shortages of skilled, experienced personnel. Our own team had recently acquired two new members, the teenage Strugalatsky brothers from Odessa who spent half their time goofing off, either loafing or leaping across the toppled trees, making stupid sci-fi sounds while slashing random branches, instead of taking them off systematically, in the recommended order. Cynics laid wagers over how long the two
dolbobs
might survive, and the bookie odds weren’t good. After the seventh or eighth time that I grabbed one of them, chided him and corrected potentially lethal faults in his suit-buttoning, I decided to give up and let nature take its course.

“One of the top ways that the Coss rationalize their harsh rule,”
old Starper Litow had explained one evening, amid the fuming lesson smoke,
“is that our late Twenty-First Century Earth had become too tame. Too orderly and charitable. Homo sapiens wasn’t improving, except with techniques like brain boosting, which helped everybody, and thus canceled out any overall, genetic advancement. The Coss claim to have done us a favor through conquest, by establishing a new, more strenuous order. To restore human progress where it matters most – in the raw makeup of our natures. By restarting evolution. Both natural selection... and of course, their own special breeding program.”

Litow had touched upon topics that deeply concerned me. I hoped, someday to get the elderly exile to elaborate. But curiosity must wait. For now, we had a problem. If the schedule wasn’t met, all our lives might be in danger, “selecting” Yelena and me for the dust-bin of Cosstory.

A trumpeted warning echoed in our ear-pickups – elepent bulls on final approach irritably admonishing us to clear our landing zone as another treefall approached. They, too, had schedules to keep if they ever wanted to rejoin the matriarchal herds, grazing the crystal savannahs of Luna.

The overseer’s voice assumed a note of panic. And so, I took a chance. Yelena was experienced enough to finish stacking leaves onto the sledge all by herself. More important, she seemed focused, not distracted. So I signaled her to –
work alone for a while.
She nodded with evident pride in my trust, an expression – visible through the pitted face-plate of her vacuum ushanka – that warmed me as I bent... then vaulted high over the work-site, in order to look.