Today's Reading
Svyatoslav wrapped his plastidown blanket around himself and brought the drone in a wide circle, arcing over the green land of drone perception, curving down toward the tent, which shone like a sack of coals, each of the six men inside a blurry, brighter spot. The drone hovered and listened.
"It's not that I won't let him drink," Dmitriy was saying. "It's that he's never wanted to. And you know how it is—once you've started, it's how you will finish. I don't want that for him. I want him to finish in another way. Far from here."
"Beyond thrice-nine lands in the thrice-tenth kingdom," Myusena said.
Drunken laughter.
"Something like that. You know your Russian folktales well for a Nenets."
"My father wasn't Nenets. He was Russian. In fact, he was a man like you."
"Like me?"
"Yes. A man who thought he could pass the good on to his son without the bad."
There was silence in the tent, for a moment.
Then one of the other men said, "He's right, Mitya. All our fathers were the same."
"Well, let's drink to our fathers then. They wanted the best, but it turned out the same as always."
Laughter.
Svyatoslav switched the drone into its autoreturn routine. He took the headset off and lay down on the ground. It was warm enough to sleep out here. He wouldn't have to return to the stinking tent. The stars blazed above him. The Milky Way was wide and dusty as a road. The drone settled down to the grass beside him with a whir.
That smell. He brought his hands up to his face. The copper smell never washed out. It cut through everything else. Every time he came back from one of these trips, he stank of blood. At first fresh, and then congealed and sweet-rotted, the stench haunting him even after a hot shower. Sometimes it came from nowhere, weeks later, as he was standing in line at a store or drifting off to sleep, as if it had been preserved inside him and exhaled through his pores.
"Never again," he said aloud. "I'll never have to do it again."
But at once the thought was contradicted by another one.
It wouldn't work. They wouldn't get the money. They wouldn't get out.
The hunters all went into the earth early, one way or another.
Into the frozen underworld with Nga.
CHAPTER THREE
"What will I feel?" Damira asked the woman in the white lab coat behind the bank of terminals. The woman had come into the room without introducing herself, and begun adjusting equipment. A graduate student or postdoctoral resident with the project. "People report different things. Some say they feel nothing at all. Others say the scan brings up memories. that it somehow brushes up against them and brings them back to consciousness. They see their lives. Memory by memory, before them."
"Like when you die."
"Yes. that's what they say, right? That's the superstition."
Damira hoped there would be nothing.
She had not agreed, at first, to be backed up. She received the notice on her terminal to report to the Institute, and ignored the summons. She had not come back to Russia for this—had not come back to take part in the Institute's experiments.
She had come back to get more support for the war against the poachers in Kenya. That is what it was—a war. She called it a war because that was the word she thought might get people's attention. And she called it a war because just like every war, it existed only for the people it was happening to. Like every war, it was particular to a place and time. Everywhere else, it could be ignored.
In Moscow, life continued as if nothing was happening at all. As if tens of thousands of elephants were not dying. As if the rhino were not already nearly extinct, surviving only in test tubes and zoos. People in Moscow drank fancy Western coffees at three times the price paid in the West and wandered, blank-faced, down Stary Arbat's cobblestones, lost in self-improvement feedstreams. People were certain that, no matter what the problem was, it could not touch 'them.' People were certain 'someone else' would fix it, if they even thought of the war at all.
This excerpt ends on page 15 of the hardcover edition.
Monday, August 5th, we begin the book Past Crimes by Jason Pinter.
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