Russian Spring

by Norman Spinrad

Genres: Science Fiction; Hard Science Fiction; Space Opera

Synopsis

In the near future, the debt-laden U.S. owns a technology that renders it "the world's best-defended Third World country." The only real outer-space planning is in Common Europe, so young American "space cadet" Jerry Reed goes to work in Paris. He falls in love with and marries Soviet career bureaucrat Sonya Gagarin and the story jumps ahead 20 years, blending world events with a focus on their family. Sonya's star has risen with the Euro-Russians' while Jerry has been stymied by pervasive anti-Americanism. Daughter Franja has her father's space fever and enrolls in a Russian space school; son Bob, fiercely curious about an earlier, admired America before it was run by xenophobic "Gringos," enters Berkeley. Ten years later the U.S. is a pariah, Euro-Russia the pet of the civilized world and the Reeds scattered - politics forced Jerry and Sonya's divorce, Franja speaks only to her mother and Bob is trapped in "Festung Amerika." A series of odd, occasionally tragic events brings the family (and the world) together. Despite some tech-talk this is not science fiction: the first two-thirds of this hefty book is chillingly logical, if sometimes very funny, and while the "happy" ending may seem forced, Spinrad ( Bug Jack Barron ) gives us a wild, exhilarating ride into the next century.

Release date: May 27, 2013

Publisher: Gateway

Print pages: 567

Sample

Secretary Goddard: “Sooner or later, Bill, we’re going to have to face the unfortunate fact that Latin America simply isn’t capable of standing alone.”

Bill Blair: “Standing alone against what, Mr. Secretary?”

Secretary Goddard: “Standing alone on its own two feet. Successfully managing modern economies with stable currencies, feeding its own people, and maintaining some semblance of stable democratic government. They certainly aren’t doing it now, and history is no cause for optimism. A passive role is an abdication of responsibility.”

Bill Blair: “You mean we should intervene openly in the affairs of Latin American countries whose internal policies are not to our liking?”

Secretary Goddard: “I mean we should do whatever we have to do to establish stable democratic governments capable of joining with us to form a Western Hemispheric Common Market that will prevent this hemisphere from turning into another Africa! And if that’s your idea of gunboat diplomacy, well then I’ll be proud to have you call me a gunboat diplomat!”

—Newspeak, with Bill Blair

STAGGERING TOWARD DISASTER OR JUST TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS?

The Americans seem to be staggering into yet another mini Vietnam in Latin America, and outraged but impotent European opinion seems to be stumbling once more into the wishful conclusion that it will be a disaster like all the others.

But what if the wise men have been wrong all along? Certainly this latest intervention seems like a disaster for the poor Costa Ricans, and certainly it seems likely to involve the United States in yet another endless military quagmire.

But what if the Americans have been applying different lessons all along? For them, after all, the Vietnam War was a long period of domestic economic prosperity. And the Gulf War taught them that no other nation on earth could hope to successfully oppose their high-tech might, establishing the United States as the impoverished military overlord of the planet.

“If you’ve got it, flaunt it,” goes an old and currently quite ominous American aphorism. And if you don’t have much of anything else, is nakedly flaunting your de facto military overlordship really a mistake in the amoral world of political and economic realpolitik?

What if keeping their military involved in endless little military quagmires in Latin America is precisely what the American economic establishment has intended all along?

—Libération

AMERICA FOR THE AMERICANS

The condemnation of our efforts to rescue Costa Rica from far-left fanatics and outright chaos by the Common European Parliament, led by self-righteous German Green Socialists, and the threat of economic sanctions implied, should finally convince even the most Europhilic skeptics that half a century of American generosity has been cynically betrayed in the service of Common European economic hegemonism.

When we saved Europe from the Nazis, we were hailed as heroes. When we rebuilt their shattered economies with Marshall Plan aid, we were praised as benefactors. When we stood with them against Soviet imperialism, we were staunch allies. When we preserved their oil supplies in the Gulf with our arms and our treasure, we saved their economic prosperity at no little cost to ourselves.

When the reunited Germany was hardwired into a tighter confederal Common Europe, there was loud cheering on both sides of the Atlantic that the so-called German Question had at long last been solved. The Soviets pulled their troops back behind their own borders in return for untold billions of deutsche marks in grants, loans, and joint venture capital, and the United States was able to bring its troops home at last.

Now we see how we have been repaid for preserving European freedom and prosperity for half a century and more.

We find ourselves frozen out of the largest economic market the world has ever known. We find ourselves facing a Common Europe, dominated economically by the German colossus, determined to sabotage our efforts to establish a Western Hemispheric Common Market.

We have an enormous overseas debt to the very beneficiaries of our generosity and goodwill, a staggering economy, and an unholy alliance meddling in our own hemisphere, led by a swaggeringly self-righteous Germany, with the Soviet Union cheering it on from the sidelines.

America stands alone. And in sad retrospect, we can see that it has always been so. When our aid was needed, the nations of Europe were our friends. Now that they have long since gotten what they wanted from us, they will not even leave us to tend our own front yard without their interference.

We have been had. We have no other alternative. We must build and preserve an economically free and integrated America for all Americans, North and South. We must make whatever sacrifice is necessary to insure that overwhelming European economic power is counterbalanced by absolute American military impregnability.

We must stand up to Common European hegemonism, bite the necessary bullet, and deploy Battlestar America at long last, whatever the cost.

—Washington Post

Defense stocks, particularly anything aerospace related, which have been in the doldrums for a decade, have already exploded. The early bird does indeed get the fattest and freshest worm.

But there’s still plenty of upside left in secondary and particularly tertiary issues. And even at today’s sharply risen prices, there’s still more upside left in the big aerospace conglomerates in the medium run than the pessimists think. Contrary to popular opinion on the Street, we believe it’s still not too late for smart investors to cash in on the Battlestar America bonanza. We believe that the best is yet to come. Think independent subcontractors.

—Words from Wall Street

METHOD IN THE AMERICAN MADNESS?

Conventional wisdom has it that the decision of the American Congress to fund deployments of major elements of the so-called Battlestar America nuclear defense shield was an act of collective madness. But in truly ruthless realpolitik terms, from the American point of view, maybe not.

Against whom is Battlestar America supposed to defend? Against a Soviet Union which presents no military threat? Against a peaceful and prosperous Common Europe in the midst of an economic boom? Against hypothetical Third World madmen eager to commit national suicide by launching a puny nuclear assault against the planet’s only military superpower as some naive apologists sincerely contend?

This, of course, is a question without a rational answer. But it may not be the right question. For if one asks instead what the Americans have to gain by deploying Battlestar America, however flimsy the official excuses may be, the answers become all too clear.

By deploying Battlestar America, the United States props up a sagging defense sector without which its already staggering economy would fall into a deep structural depression.

By deploying Battlestar America, the American politicians validate the billions they have poured into its development over the decades.

By deploying Battlestar America, the United States serves notice on the republics of Latin America that American force reigns supreme in the Western Hemisphere, that no matter what interventionist excesses the Americans may descend to, no one will ever have the will or the power to oppose them in their own self-proclaimed sphere of influence.

Long ago, Mikhail Gorbachev promised to do a terrible thing to America. “We will deprive you of an enemy,” he proclaimed, and lived up to his words.

And now we see the American response. Having been deprived of the enemy whose existence propped up their economy and rationalized their foreign policy for half a century, the American government has simply gone out and nominated a replacement.

If Germany and Common Europe had not existed to serve this purpose, they no doubt would have been forced to invent us. And indeed, in a certain sense, they have.

—Die Welt

With a leaden thump, a protesting squeal of rubber on concrete, and a disconcerting groan of tired metal, the old 747 hit the runway, popping open half a dozen overhead luggage bins as the thrust-reversers roared, and the plane shuddered, and the lights flickered.

It had been a truly ghastly fourteen hours from Los Angeles in this aerial cattle car, what with a thermostat that seemed incapable of maintaining a constant temperature, and two lukewarm and pasty TV dinners, and a movie machine that didn’t work, and a seat that wouldn’t recline all the way, and bad vibrations from the left inboard engine, but somehow the plane had made it, and Jerry Reed was in Paris, or anyway officially on French soil.

For a born-and-bred Californian space cadet whose only previous experience with foreign intrigue had been limited to picking up hookers in Tijuana, it was a long way, my son, from Downey.

Eight weeks ago, Jerry had been planning to spend his three-week vacation backpacking in the Sierras. He hadn’t even had a passport. Now here he was, taxiing toward the terminal at Charles de Gaulle, and heaving a great sigh of relief that he had made it to Common Europe without having it lifted.

“No, no, but of course not, there is nothing at all illegal about it,” André Deutcher had assured him. “The worst thing that can happen is that they refuse to let you board the airplane.”

“And confiscate my passport.”

André had smiled that worldly smile of his and blown out a thin pout of smoke from one of his ten ECU Upmanns. “If they confiscate your passport for trying to leave the country, then it was a document of no value in the first place, n’est-ce pas, Jerry?” he said.

“True enough,” Jerry admitted bitterly. “But if they slice my clearance for trying it, I’ll never work in the Program again, like poor Rob.”

“Rob is finished, Jerry, it is a sad thing, but it is true,” André Deutcher said much more coldly. “And because people like Rob Post are no longer welcome, so is your American space program. . . .”

“With our heavy lifters and our shuttles and our sat sleds, our basic logistic technology isn’t that far behind. . . .” Jerry protested wanly, sounding sad and foolish even to himself.

“While the Soviets are building three more Cosmograds and going to Mars and we are building the spaceplane prototype.”

“When the politics change here, all the Battlestar America technology will give us—”

“Jerry, Jerry, take my offer or not as you like,” André said, fixing him with those ambiguous gray-green eyes of his, “that much is the representative of ESA speaking. But do not delude yourself as all the people at this party must in order to face their shaving mirrors in the morning. This is what happened to Rob, n’est-ce pas, I would not wish to see the same happen to you, and this is a new friend speaking, a friend who has dreamed the same dream, and who knows all too well how he would feel had he been unfortunate enough to be born American instead of French at this hour in its history. Battlestar America is the problem, and can never be the solution. Rob knew this in his heart, yes, and thought he could fight it from within. Do not let this happen to you.”

Jerry had only known André Deutcher for three weeks now, and indeed had met him at Rob Post’s previous party. André had been introduced, by Rob himself in fact, as an ESA engineer spending his vacation time in the United States seeing the sights and meeting like-minded American space people for his own pleasure.

Jerry, of course, had not believed this for a minute, had assumed that the Frenchman was some kind of industrial spy, and had immediately begun to kid him about it. André had countered that the American civilian space program, being all but nonexistent, had no industrial secrets worth stealing, and that he was really working for French military intelligence. The bullshit had flown back and forth, and somehow a spark of friendship seemed to have been lit.

Jerry took André to the original Disneyland, showed him Forest Lawn, and managed to take him on a circumspect tour of the open areas at the Rockwell plant in Downey, and the Frenchman had in turn wined and dined Jerry on the ESA expense account at restaurants that he hadn’t even known existed.

And then tonight André had committed the California faux pas of lighting up a big cigar in the middle of the crowded living room, handing Jerry another, and insisting he do likewise.

There was an unseasonable marine layer rolling in and a foggy chill in the air, so that when Rob’s wife, Alma, had shooed them outside to smoke their noxious Havana weeds, as André had known she would, the deck of the Posts’ rotten-rustic hilltop house in Granada Hills—all that Rob had managed to salvage of the good old days—was empty.

And once André had gotten Jerry out into the chilly privacy of the foggy Southern California night, he finally dropped his cover, or so at least it seemed, and admitted what his trip to America was really about.

André Deutcher was nothing so sinister as an agent of French military intelligence or even an industrial spy. He was simply a headhunter for the European Space Agency.

“You are someone I think ESA might be interested in, Jerry,” André had told him. “Not that this is yet anything like an offer of employment, you understand. But you have told me you have a three-week vacation coming up, and I am authorized to invite you to spend it as the guest of ESA in Paris, meet some interesting people, learn more about our program, and let us learn more about you.”

He shrugged. He smiled. “At the very least, you will have a free first-class vacation in Paris, which, I may assure you, is hardly a fate worse than death, n’est-ce pas?”

It had always seemed that André really was hiding something behind his series of phony secret identities, but now, looking into his eyes out here in the chilly damp, with the lights of the San Fernando Valley far below just barely glowing beneath the bank of fog, it seemed to Jerry that André Deutcher was at last speaking from the heart. André might still be trying to sell him something, but Jerry could not deny that everything André had said was the bitter truth.

If he stayed with what was left of the Program, sooner or later, one way or another, what had happened to Rob Post was going to happen to him. If it hadn’t happened already.

Inside, the party was starting to run down, guests sitting listlessly around the guttering fireplace, leaning up against walls with half-filled paper cups hanging in their hands.

Running down. Like Rob Post himself, blearily surveying the detritus from the kitchen doorway, like the Program itself, facing the endless morning after.

Rob Post had been a friend of his father’s since before Jerry was born, and Jerry’s most potent early memory was of being rousted from bed by Daddy in the middle of the night, handed a huge bowl of chocolate ice cream swimming in dark gooey Hershey’s by Rob, and then sitting between them on a dusty old couch in a darkened living room, watching the TV with the ice cream bowl in his lap, gobbling it up with a big serving spoon and smearing it all over his pajamas—a bleary four-year-old suddenly wakened into an unreal hog heaven.

“Sandy’s gonna really read me out over this, Jerry, and you’re not gonna understand till you’re grown up,” Daddy said. “Do you have any idea why I’m letting you eat all the chocolate ice cream with syrup you can handle tonight?”

“Because you love me, Daddy?” Jerry said, blissfully digging into it.

Daddy hugged him and kissed him on the cheek. “So you’ll remember this moment all of your life,” Daddy said in a silly solemn voice. “You’re too young to understand what you’re going to see tonight, but you’re not too young to understand a whole pint of Häagen-Dazs.”

“It’s an experiment, Jerry,” Uncle Rob told him. “The greatest moment in human history is about to happen and you’re alive to see it, but you’re too young to remember it with understanding. So what your Dad and I are trying to do is implant a sensory engram in your long-term memory so that when you grow up you can call it up and be here now with your adult consciousness.”

Uncle Rob giggled. “And if you eat so much you puke, so much the better for your future recall,” he said.

Jerry didn’t puke, but he did remember. The bittersweet cold softness and double-good hit of chocolate syrup over chocolate ice cream still never failed to time-warp him back to that couch in the living room, watching the Moon Landing with Daddy and Rob.

He had been hooked on chocolate ice cream ever since, to the detriment of his endless battle against the scale, but he could sit there in the body of a blissful four-year-old and watch Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon in real time with his adult consciousness, transforming the memory of somatic joy into the deeper joy of true understanding.

The strange pearlescent television-gray lunar landscape coming up under the lander camera to the laconic crackle of far-off voices from Houston . . . The hollow descending hiss of the retrorockets through the metal bulkhead . . . “The Eagle has landed.” And then the bulky figure descending that ladder in slow motion . . . And Armstrong’s hesitant voice blowing the scripted line as his foot came down on the gray pumice and changed the destiny of the species forever. “That’s, uh, one small step for man, uh, one giant leap for mankind.”

Oh yes, as a boy Jerry had only to taste chocolate ice cream to be transported back to the moment whose memory would shape his whole life, and later, he had only to imagine the taste of chocolate ice cream covered with Hershey’s bittersweet chocolate syrup to replay the Moon Landing through an adult perception that could thank Dad and Rob from the bottom of his heart for the best present any four-year-old could ever have, for giving his adult self this clear and joyous memory, for the dream they had knowingly and lovingly implanted within him.

That was how much the space program meant to Dad and Rob, and while Dad never did much more than join the L-5 Society and the Planetary Society and every space lobby in between, Rob Post had followed the dream and given it his all.

He had joined the Program fresh out of Cal Tech and landed a job as a glorified draftsman on the Mariner project. He was at best a mediocre engineer, but as he worked his way up the ladder, it became apparent that he had a certain talent for project direction, for getting better engineers than he could ever be to work together toward a common goal. He believed in mankind’s destiny as a space-going species with an ion-blue purity, he could translate that passion into belief in the project at hand, and when he was on, he could infect a team with that same passionate innocence.

He got to work on Voyager and on the shuttles, and he gave up smoking dope when the piss tests came in and he had to, and he took long backpack hikes in the Sierras and worked out every day, for he was still under fifty and he had accumulated clout, and if Mars was out of the question, he certainly had a good shot at a Moonbase tour if they got one built before he turned sixty and if he kept his nose clean and his body in shape. Or anyway that was the fantasy upon which his whole life was focused before the Challenger explosion.

With a father who had turned him loose in his vast, untidy collection of musty science-fiction magazines, paperback books, and model spacecraft before he was old enough to read, and Rob Post for a favorite “uncle,” Jerry knew what he was going to be when he grew up before he was old enough to know what growing up meant.

He was going to be an astronaut. He was going to float out there, weightless in the vasty deep. He was going to walk the pale gray pockmarked lunar surface, and search for remains of life on Mars. He was going to the asteroids and Titan, and who knows, it was not entirely beyond the realm of possibility, he was young, the Program was moving fast, life extension loomed on the horizon, he just might live long enough to be among the first to set foot on a planet circling another sun.

“The Moon maybe, Mars, if I’m incredibly lucky, but that’s as far as an old fart like me is going to get, kiddo,” Rob would tell Jerry in the days when he was beavering his way through high school. “But you, hey, you were lucky enough to be born at the right time, Jerry. You crack those books, and by the time you’re out of college, we’ll have a lunar base. Mars before you’re thirty. Titan before you’re fifty. You could live to see the first starship launched. You could even be on it. You’re going to live in the golden age of space exploration, kiddo. It’s up to you. You can be one of the people who makes it all happen.”

So Jerry ground his way through high school, and, with his good marks and an effusive letter of recommendation from old grad Rob Post, got into Cal Tech, where he majored in aerospace engineering.

Jerry busted his balls his first three years at Cal Tech. Almost literally. The work was hard, but he was a practiced student by now and a totally committed one, and he aced his way to the top 5 percent with little difficulty.

But he knew that he had to do more than make the top of his class to get into astronaut training. He had to get himself into physical condition, and for a nerdish grind with no interest in sports, a naturally endomorphic body, and an addiction to chocolate ice cream, that wasn’t easy.

Rob Post was there for him then too, and a good thing, for Dad was the quintessential couch potato. Rob introduced him to long backpacking hikes in the Sierras. He bought him a set of weights for his birthday. By the middle of Jerry’s sophomore year, he had shed his blubber, built himself a set of muscles, and was doing better with girls than he ever had in his life, learning to get his endorphins charged via sex and sweat instead of chocolate.

And then, during his junior year, the Challenger exploded, and took the civilian space program with it, or rather the long hiatus between the Challenger disaster and the next shuttle launch exposed and finalized what in retrospect could be seen to have already happened.

The bright future in space that had seemed inevitable when Jerry was a four-year-old never happened. No space station by 1975. No lunar base by 1980. No Mars by 1985. Oh yes, the 1970s and early ’80s were a golden age of unmanned space exploration, with the incredible pictures from Mars, and the Jovian moons, and the rings of Saturn, but the real space program—the manned space program, the actual raison d’être, the evolution of humanity into a space-going species—essentially sat there spinning its wheels for the decade between the last Apollo and the long-delayed advent of the space shuttle.

And by that time, Ronald Reagan was President, and military budgets were soaring, and Star Wars started gobbling up space funding, and the Air Force already had its hooks deep into the shuttle, into NASA, and about 40 percent of the payloads were already military even before the Challenger exploded.

Those in the know, like Rob Post, knew damn well that the Challenger had been destroyed by political pressure to launch outside the shuttle’s safe-flight envelope, or as Rob had put it at the time, “Give me a thermometer reading fifty degrees Fahrenheit, and I’ll gladly get on one tomorrow.”

But it took a two-year hiatus of bureaucratic ass-covering for NASA to finally work up its courage to launch Discovery, and by that time the Agency’s spirit was broken, and its administrative structure had been thoroughly militarized, and there was a huge backlog of military payloads, and the civilian space budget had been cut to the bone and then some, and the doom of any visionary American civilian manned space program had been quite thoroughly sealed.

When the dust cleared, endless Star Wars pilot-study funding had been so cunningly hardwired into the budgetary process that it had a life of its own. Even the disappearance of the Soviet Union as a credible bogeyman made no difference, especially after Saddam Hussein conveniently allowed the Pentagon to nominate the entire Third World as a replacement. The idea of a career as a civilian astronaut had become pathetically ludicrous by the time Jerry graduated.

Rob Post was there to offer Jerry advice and aid again, but now it was of a sadly different sort. By this time, Rob had advanced into the upper middle-management levels at Rockwell, a spacecraft project manager with a good track record at a time when contracts for civilian projects were becoming virtually nonexistent.

During Jerry’s senior year at Cal Tech, Rob had held his nose, sighed, and taken the job of manager on the Advanced Maneuverable Bus project. “It’s that or join the army of the unemployed,” Rob insisted wanly. “Besides, it’s not as if the damn thing doesn’t have potential civilian applications. . . .”

The AMB was typical of the myriad low-profile cheap projects that kept Star Wars alive during the scaled-back “Bright Pebbles” hiatus before European outrage at the Latin American interventions finally gave the defense industry what it needed to push its deployment through Congress as Battlestar America. The AMB was basically an upscaling and redesign of the MX fourth-stage warhead bus, supposedly to be used to deploy scores of cheap little orbital interceptors, at least as far as Congress was concerned.

But what the Air Force had really commissioned behind that smoke screen was a platform that could be launched into Low Earth Orbit with a variable mixed payload of at least twenty reentry vehicles and/or boost-phase interceptors. It had to be able to station-keep for a year without refueling, change orbits up to a point, juke and jerk to avoid satellite killers, and launch its payloads with a high degree of accuracy.

“Shitcan the warheads and interceptors, give it a big fuel tank and corresponding thrusters, mount a pressure cabin on it, and you’ve got yourself a space jeep to take you from LEO to GEO,” Rob would muse dreamily.

When Jerry graduated, Rob was able to hire him on as an entry-level wage slave on the AMB project. But even a naïf like Jerry could see what Rob was doing once he got to Rockwell. Everyone on the project knew it. Everyone was collaborating in the deception, knowing, of course, that it was Rob Post who would take the flak if and when the Air Force copped to what was going on.

What was going on was that Rob Post, like the Air Force itself, was pursuing his own hidden agenda. He was using the Air Force funding to design a Low Orbit to Geosynchronous Orbit ferry with the capability to take crews to a GEO space station that didn’t exist in the guise of giving them their Advanced Maneuverable Bus.

The thrusters were far bigger than anything a warhead and interceptor bus needed. The so-called refueling collar was being designed to take a large fuel tank neatly balanced along the long axis to handle a 1-g thrust. The bus platform itself was being designed to accommodate forty interceptors so that a pressure cabin would have room atop it. And so forth.

Perhaps this had something to do with the fact that Rob was smoking grass again, or perhaps vice versa. Though he had stopped when the piss tests came in, he had started again sometime during the early stages of the AMB project, coming home to Granada Hills, toking up, sitting down at the computer, and designing, on his own time, the pressure cabin, and the expanded fuel-tank module that would turn the AMB into a space ferry that could take ten people from LEO to GEO.

Eventually, of course, the inevitable happened.

The Air Force gave the design a thorough going-over before the AMB went to prototype, and some bright boy realized what was happening. Early one bleary Monday morning, the piss patrol showed up in force and had everyone working on the project urinate into test tubes in plain view.

Such snap mass random testing was not quite unheard-of, but when they took blood samples to nail down the evidence of any infraction of the purity regs, everyone knew that the plug was about to be pulled.

Somehow Rob Post’s piss tested out pure, but they caught him with borderline traces of cannabinol in the blood sample, which might or might not have washed him out of the Program for life if he had chosen to fight a dismissal in court. So instead of trying to nail him directly, they got cute about it.

They canceled the AMB project prior to prototype, which cost Rockwell big bucks, and they made it quite clear that Rockwell’s chances of landing the replacement program would be slim and none if Rob Post was still on their payroll. What was more, he must not be permitted to resign, he had to be forthrightly fired for mismanagement of Air Force funding.

This the Rockwell management was far from reluctant to do, when they toted up how much the cancellation of the AMB had cost them. Rob Post was rather loudly fired, and Rockwell got the sat-sled contract.

Rob, as they say, never worked in the Program again, or at least not directly, eking out a precariously unpredictable if not exactly penurious living as a technical consultant on various non-Program projects via his many connections in the California high-tech and space communities. Meanwhile, he threw these parties every month or so to maintain his sad and forlorn connection to people like Jerry who were still in the Program.

Such as it was.

Jerry looked away from the tired party scene behind the glass balco