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Baikonur’s jail cells had been coming in handy as storage closets for some time.
It was unfortunate that they had had to clear a closet for this.
When Eva left her office, she didn’t stop walking. She radioed ahead and had one of the guards preemptively open the door. If she stopped walking, she might pause. If she paused, she wasn’t sure she would finish her walk. That wouldn’t be acceptable.
She strode in. The door clicked shut behind her.
He looked up.
He didn’t look bad physically. The guards that had tackled him when he ran had been…as gentle as you can be, when you’re tackling someone. The room was cold and he was huddling inside his big jacket. But every room was cold now.
He looked at her and she saw death in his eyes. Acceptance, maybe. Not the acceptance of a man who had come around. Just one who knew he was cornered, and didn’t have it in him to fight back.
“Hey”, she said, because she didn’t know where else to start, and there was no one else in the room to pick up on that. He glared at her.
“The launch is on schedule.” She supplied next. That update had begun every conversation she had had for the past three months. He had been a part of most of them. “You’ll be on your way soon.”
“Whoopee.” He stated, shifting his gaze back to the wall.
Well. She probably deserved that.
She pulled the chair out from the little desk and swung it around to sit down. He was so still. Usually he was so full of energy; bouncing from machine to machine, making everyone else laugh, tapping his leg or bouncing his pen.
“I know you won’t believe this, but it wasn’t easy for me to do this to you.”
“Yeah, you’re really sentimental.”
It was easy to brush off a barb you’d heard a million times before. That didn’t mean it didn’t hurt.
This was a stupid idea. Why was she here? She didn’t owe him anything. She hadn’t bothered explaining anything more than she needed to to him before, and it had worked out almost perfectly. She took a deep breath through her nose, hoping he didn’t notice. This wasn’t about him. As loath as she was to admit it to herself, this was something she needed.
“Do you know what I studied in college?”
He shrugged, still staring resolutely at the wall.
“It was history. Both my liscence and my master’s degrees.” Aha. Eye movement towards her. “People are usually surprised that it wasn’t science, or even business.”
“It doesn’t really seem like you.” He admitted, scooting up to sit on the bed and looking in her general direction. “You don’t spend a lot of time looking backward.”
“I’m always looking backward.” She couldn’t help scoffing. Did he not realize that? She had missed so much. “I was eighteen years old and had no idea what to do with my life.” She settled back into the chair, remembering the little bob she had maintained all throughout her schooling. “Hard to imagine me like that, huh?”
“Yeah.” He was looking at her more intently now. She turned her head, looking for the scrap of sky she could see through the barred window.
“But what I learned was that you can always figure out what to do next by understanding what has already happened. Not just knowing what happened, in the way of reciting numbers and dates, but understanding.”
No more sitting. She could feel his eyes following her as she started pacing around the room; it’s not like there was anything else for him to look at. “And what humanity fails to understand, again and again, is how good we have it right now. Even with Astrophage, somehow, we're lucky. It arrived at a time when we’re able to do something. If Astrophage had arrived even just a century ago, a microscopic amount of cosmic time, all we would be able to do is die.”
He shifted on the bed, pulling his legs closer to himself. Well. Good.
“For fifty thousand years, right up to the industrial revolution, the baseline focus of every culture was food production. We glorify the products of the elite of every culture, but again and again we forget that the vast majority of people were farmers, or shepherds, or hunters, or gatherers. Every writing system we know of originated with numbers and words for animals. And the elite that we glorify were the elite because of the control they were able to exert over the food supply. Quite literally. Even into the industrial revolution. Have you heard the anecdote about Japanese soldiers understanding how dominant America was technologically, in the Pacific during World War Two?” She turned her head to look back at him. So they were looking at each other.
He blinked at her. “Uh. No, I haven’t.”
“It goes that the Japanese understood how outmatched they were when, from their ships running out of medicine and food during the long war, they realized the Americans had a ship devoted to the delivery of ice cream.”
He nodded. “That’s a lot of resources to devote to something…frivolous.”
Such a quick study. He shifted on the bed again.
“I know you said that you weren’t trying to talk me into this, but…it still kind of seems like you’re trying to talk me into this.”
“I’m not.” She lied. “But I want you to understand why I’m doing what I’m doing.”
“I get it, Stratt.” He rubbed a hand across his face, dropping his glasses on the bed. “It’s the ultimate trolley problem. You’re sacrificing three people to save humanity. You’re morally right, I promise.” He looked at her again. Really looked, this time, up at her from where he remained on the bed, no glasses, no hiding behind his hair, no funny quips. “I’m just a coward, like you said. I’m scared of...I'm scared of death staring me in the face like that. I can’t handle it.”
“That’s a bullshit answer, Grace.” He flinched. She glowed inside. “That’s the numbers and the dates. Not the truth.”
“I’m a scientist!” He flopped back onto the bed. “What answer were you looking for? All the answers I can give you are numbers. And numbers are true, for the record, universally."
She stepped over the bed, standing over him. “Scientists also develop theories. Develop a theory, Grace. Understand what I’m telling you.”
“I can’t do it.” He threw his hands up. “The numbers are too big for me. Astrophage is little, tiny. I’m not built to understand what you’re trying to get me to, Stratt.”
“You still haven’t even grasped what I’m trying to talk about.” There was—a wall. She was beating on it with her fists, and he couldn't see it, and he couldn't hear her.
“Well, I guess I’m just a better teacher than you.” He grumbled.
“That was never in question.”
They lapsed into silence.
He broke it, like she knew he would.
“When kids don’t grasp a complex concept, it helps to give a smaller, concrete explanation.” He was fiddling with his hands. Looking for the hacky sack that was already packed in his bag. “Eighth graders have a hard time wrapping their heads around sound being a physical force, until you show them how music affects sand. That was a demonstration that I did a lot.”
She could see it in her mind’s eye. He probably stretched fabric over a speaker and then sung an idiotic song. With silly sunglasses, or a funny hat.
“I wrote my Master’s thesis on the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Resistance.” She began. He blinked at her again. Too specific.
“While that treaty was being negotiated,” she turned away from him, “all of my grandparents were starving in Berlin.”
She felt him go still from across the room. Her heart was racing. Her palms were clammy.
“None of them would talk to us about it. Not even to my parents. But then my grandmother, my mother’s mother, was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s.”
She searched for the scrap of sky outside the window again. “I was already away at university, but my mother refused to put her in a home. So we had phone calls, intermittently. She usually thought that I was one of her older sisters. And she would tell me about the fresh, green leaves on the trees she had seen that day. She wondered if they would make a good soup, so that they could eat something fresh, and maybe skip some of the moldy rations they were presented with so frequently. She was so excited about asparagus.”
She let out a breath she didn’t know she had been holding. “She would discuss with me who in their block needed more help. She lamented babies dying, because their mothers couldn’t produce enough milk to keep them alive. And this was East Berlin, not Ukraine, not Kazakhstan, not Siberia.” Something settled inside her. She turned back around to look at him. He was still looking at her. Thank god.
“It is not hard to commend other people to their death, Doctor Grace. Bureaucrats across history have killed uncountable millions through ignorance and lassitude. What is hard is ensuring that I have done everything I can to not be one of them.”
Through her whole monologue, he had rolled off the bed and come to stand in front of her. His hands were in his pockets, and he was searching her face as if he thought he could find some new thing there, something he could continue to find palatable. “Your goal is to kill people purposefully?”
“Yes." She raised her chin, meeting his eyes. "Senseless death was everywhere already, and it comes for us now faster than it ever has before.” She took a deep breath. “So I am not sorry to send you to a death with purpose. I only hope that you can understand–not know, understand; why I am doing it. And that it is hard to send you.”
He started laughing. Incredulous, desperate laughter. He doubled over, then came back up, gasping for air.
“Is this your confession? Am I your priest now, after being your– your lapdog, and your guinea pig?”
Ah. So he could hear her, after all.
“Yes.”
They stared at each other. She tracked the twitching of the crow's feet around his eyes, the cowlick sticking up from the back of his head.
Then she turned and left.