Against the Day (200 page)

Despite
the “Eleventh Commandment” prevailing among freelance adventurers of the time,
the boys agreed unhesitatingly to take the case. Initial payment was in gold,
which Baklashchan had packed in on a Bactrian camel, which stood patiently
beneath the shadow of the
Inconvenience
cast by a nearly full moon.

“And
please do convey our regards to the Tsar and his family,” Randolph reminded the
emissary. “We cherish our memories of their hospitality at the Winter Palace.”

   
“We
should be seeing them quite soon,” said Baklashchan.

In
the protracted journey which was to follow, covering eventually most of the
WorldIsland, it would not escape the boys’ attention that something very
peculiar indeed was going on down on the Surface. More and more often, detours
became necessary. Entire blocks of sky were posted as offlimits. Now and then
there would arrive, from nowhere immediately visible, great explosions of a
deep and unprecedented intensity which caused structural members of the
skycraft to groan and tremble. Miles began to encounter unexpected shortages
when making commissary purchases. One day his most reliable wine purveyor
brought alarming news. “Shipments of Champagne have been suspended
indefinitely. All through the growing region now, the countryside is torn up
with trenches.”

   
“Trenches,”
Miles said, as if it were a foreign technical term.

The
merchant gazed back at length, and may have gone on speaking, though he could
no longer be heard clearly. Miles was aware in some dim

way that this, as so much else, had to do with the terms of
the long unspoken contract between the boys and their fate—as if, long
ago, having learned to fly, in soaring free from enfoldment by the indicative
world below, they had paid with a waiver of allegiance to it and all that would
occur down on the Surface. He switched his order to still wine from Spain, and
the
Inconvenience
flew on, dodging from place to place across the great
counterplanet, so strange and yet so familiar, the elusive Padzhitnoff always
just a step or two ahead.

“And another odd thing,” announced
Chick one evening at their regular weekly review of progress on the case. “The
travels of Captain Padzhitnoff,” tapping a pointer across the map that covered
the entire forward bulkhead of
Inconvenience
’s
wardroom, “over the years, have pretty closely matched our
own. No surprises there. But looking only at the months just before he
disappeared, everyplace we’d been that year,” tapping one by one—“the
Riviera, Rome, St. Petersburg, Lwów, the High Tatra—old Padzhy’s gone as
well. Where we haven’t been yet, he seems to have left no trace.”

   
“Swell!”
Darby ejaculated. “We’re chasing ourselves now.”

“We always knew he was haunting us,”
shrugged Lindsay. “Likely this is only more of the same.”

“Not this time,” declared Miles,
retreating into his customary silence, and only resuming the thought some
months later, one night off the coast of Cyrenaica, as he and Chick were on the
fantail sharing a smoke and regarding the luminosity of the sea. “Are ghosts
dreadful because they bring toward us from the future some component—in
the vectorial sense—of our own deaths? Are they partially, defectively,
our own dead selves, thrust back, in recoil from the mirrorface at the end, to
haunt us?”

Chick,
who regarded the metaphysical as outside his remit, settled as usual for
nodding and puffing politely.

Not
until some additional months later, in the baleful mists above West Flanders,
would Miles abruptly recall his sunlit bicycle excursion long ago with Ryder
Thorn, who had been possessed that day by such a tragic air of prophecy. “Thorn
knew we’d come back here. That there would be something down there we ought to
pay attention to.” He gazed, as if desire were all it would take, down through
the gray rainlight, at terrain revealed now and then through the clouds, like a
poisoned sea brought still.

“Those
poor innocents,” he exclaimed in a stricken whisper, as if some blindness had
abruptly healed itself, allowing him at last to see the horror transpiring on
the ground. “Back at the beginning of this
.
. .
they must have been boys, so much like us
. . . .
They knew they were standing before a great chasm none
could see to the bottom of. But they launched themselves into it

anyway. Cheering and laughing. It was their own grand
‘Adventure.’ They were juvenile heroes of a WorldNarrative—unreflective
and free, they went on hurling themselves into those depths by tens of
thousands until one day they awoke, those who were still alive, and instead of
finding themselves posed nobly against some dramatic moral geography, they were
down cringing in a mud trench swarming with rats and smelling of shit and
death.”

“Miles,” said Randolph in some
concern. “What is it? What do you see down there?”

Not many days after that, somewhere
over France, Miles happened to be on watch in the Tesla shack when a red smear
appeared without warning in the vaporous sky ahead of them, and slowly grew
larger. Seizing the voicecone of the apparatus, Miles began calling into it,
“
Neizvestnyi Vozdushnyi Korabl!
neizvestnyi vozdushnyi korabl!
”
which was Russian for
“Unknown airship! unknown airship!” Not “unknown,” by then, to Miles, of
course.

   
A
familiar voice replied, “Looking for us, balloonboys?”

It
was the old
Bolshai’a Igra,
all right, grown by now to dozens of times
its former size. The Romanoff crest had vanished from its envelope, which
instead was now all a single chaste expanse of saturated red, and the ship’s
name had been changed to
Pomne o Golodayushchiki.

“Remember
the Starving,” explained Captain Padzhitnoff, whose former athletic glow seemed
now to have grown phosphorescent, as if arising from a source less material
than blood.

“Igor!”
Randolph beamed,
“
Dobro pozhalovat,
”
as
somewhere on the Russian vessel a bell, a scale model of the
famous TsarBell of Moscow, given the crew by Nicholas II himself, began to
clamor.

“Means
‘Come and get it!
’ ”
said the
Captain. “We would be honored to have you all join us for midday meal.”

There
was beet and cabbage soup, buckwheat cooked like oatmeal, and black bread, from
which a strange sort of cranberryflavored beer had also been fermented, and in
the middle of the table, where the boys usually had a lemonade pitcher, an
enormous jug full of vodka from the ship’s distillery.

The
connection with the Okhrana having been long severed, Padzhitnoff related,
these days his ship and crew flew everywhere across Europe and Inner Asia, no
longer dropping brickwork but sending food, clothing and— since a great
influenza epidemic the boys had not till now been aware of— medical
supplies, gently down by parachute to whatever populations below were in need
of them.

“Someone
hired us to find you,” Randolph told him forthrightly. “Our instructions were
to notify them as soon as we did. But we have not yet reported in. Should we?”

   
“If
you tell them you can’t find us, do you owe them money?”

   
“Nahh,
we had ’em strike all the penalty clauses,” said Legal Officer Suckling.

“If
it’s who we think it is,” Pavel Sergeievitch, the ship’s intelligence officer,
chuckled professionally, “they’d rather send out assassination teams anyway.
Revenge is better than rubles.”

“Baklashchan
is unfamiliar by name, but not his type,” said Padzhitnoff. “He is another
podlets
—a
cringer. Thousands of them have denounced us, thousands more will. Under Tsar,
with Okhrana, our status was always in question
. . . .
These days, I think we are fugitives, declared enemies of
whatever is in power now.”

   
“Where
is your base of operations, then?” Chick inquired.

“Like
good bandits, we have hideout in mountains.
Shtab
is in Switzerland,
though we are not Red Cross, being far less saintlike, in fact funded from profiteering
in coffee and chocolate, big business in Geneva till 1916 when everybody but us
got arrested and deported. We are on our way back there now, if you’re
interested. We’ll show you our private Alp. Looks like solid mountain, but it’s
all hollowed out inside, full of contraband. You like chocolate? We give you
good price.”

Back
aboard
Inconvenience
the boys met in the wardroom to discuss their
course of action.

“We’ve
signed a contract,” Lindsay reminded everybody. “It continues in force. We must
either turn Captain Padzhitnoff over to the authorities of his country or
escort him to safety, and become fugitives from justice ourselves.”

“Maybe
Russia’s not his country anymore,” Darby pointed out. “Maybe it ain’t ‘justice’
he’s fleeing from.
You
don’t know, dimwit.”

“Not
perhaps to the degree of certitude prevailing among the general public as to
your mother’s preference for the genitalia of the larger and less
discriminating zoo animals,” Lindsay replied. “Nevertheless—”

   
“Oooh,”
murmured the other boys.

From
a bookshelf nearby Darby had already produced a legal volume and begun to thumb
through it. “Yes. I quote from the English Slander of Women Act of 1891—”

“Gentlemen,”
Randolph pleaded. He gestured out the windows, where longrange artillery shells,
till quite recently objects of mystery, glittering with the colors of late
afternoon, could be seen just reaching the tops of their trajectories and
pausing in the air for an instant before the deadly plunge back to Earth. Among
distant sounds of repeated explosion could also be heard the strident massed
buzzing of military aircraft. Below, across the embattled countryside, the
first searchlights of evening were coming on.

“We signed
 
nothing that included any of this,”
 
Randolph reminded everyone.

The two airships
reached Geneva in convoy. The great
silent ghost of Mont Blanc stood sentinel behind the city. Padzhitnoff’s crew
were quartered south of the river in the older part of town, where some of them
had lived as University students in the years before the Revolution. The boys
settled in eventually on an entire floor of adjoining suites, with a view over
the lake, at the former Helvetia Royale, one of the great Swiss tourist hotels
which once, before the war, had swarmed with visitors from Europe and America.

   
Despite
the influenza and shortages, the town was lively with all sorts of business.
Each city block held multiple chances for accostment by someone with a deal in
coal, or milk, or rationing cards. Spies, speculators, and confidence men mingled
with refugees and invalid internees from all the belligerent powers. Since 1916
there had been agreements in effect among Britain, Germany and France allowing
severely wounded prisoners of war to be exchanged and returned to their home
countries by way of Switzerland, while those less seriously disabled could be
interned under Swiss custody. Transport trains had begun to appear after dark,
hurtling through the country often at express speed, bearing the consumptive,
the shellshocked and imbecile. Village children crept from bed, taverns emptied
out so the customers could stand by trackside and watch the carriages drum
darkly through town. Whenever the trains paused to bring aboard a new draft of
passengers, or to stand beneath dark green trusswork holding up strangely
pointed spherical tanks to take on water, citizens appeared from nowhere with
flowers for the ailing prisoners whose names they would never learn, bottles of
homemade schnapps, chocolates hoarded for years. Suspecting that their country
was the scene of a great experiment in the possibilities of compassion in the
depths of war, they may have felt some need simply to be there and contribute
what they could.

Out
in Europe, the great Tragedy went rushing on, lit by phosphorus flares and shellbursts,
scored for the deep
ostinati
of artillery against the staccato chorales
of machinegun fire, faint suggestions of which found their waybackstage from
time to time along with smells of cordite and poison gas and rotting bodies.
But here in everyday Switzerland it was the other side of the tapestry—a
ragged, practical version of the grander spectacle out there. One could imagine
the drama, have terrible dreams, infer from those who came

off after their turns what they must
have been doing out there. But here backstage the business was of a different
nature.

Pomne
o Golodayushchiki
had
more than enough work, and Captain Padzhitnoff was happy to pass on the
overflow to the
Inconvenience.
At first most of this involved cargo
jobs—flying in goods it was no longer easy for the Swiss to import, such
as sugar, cooking fat, pasta
. . . .
The
boys spent a lot of time mostly waiting in border towns like Blotzheim, though
there were also plenty of flights inside the country, redistributing hay during
hay famines and cheese during cheese shortages, which in the later years of the
war grew chronic here. After a while the missions expanded across the borders,
running in oranges from Spain or wheat across the sea from Argentina. One day
Padzhitnoff appeared, looking as authoritative as he ever did, and announced,
“Time for promotion, balloonboys! No more cargo handling—from here on,
you are moving personnel!”