It is dawn when the train arrives at Kosmograd.
The maglev stops smoothly without making a sound, and a toneless female voice informs me that this is the end of the line. I get up, feeling slightly claustrophobic after three hours of not feeling the wind on my skin, eager to get out. I grab my luggage and do so, the doors sliding soundlessly open before me.
The station is empty. Graffitis mar its walls and my memories, and the crystal ceiling of the terminal is cracked and dark. Disgusted, I continue my way at a brisk pace, finding the familiar narrow alleyways of the Worker’s Quarter a welcome sight. Autumn leaves litter the streets and rustle under my feet.
I do not stop walking until I reach Kosmopark. In the light of dawn the ground is red and yellow, and the air is clear and sweet in my lungs. I find a bench and sit quietly for a while, breathing in the warm sense of security and familiarity. I close my eyes and listen to the waking city. I can hear its pulse: the laundry flapping in the wind seven blocks away, the low mutter of a coffee machine in an office uptown, the curse of a newspaper boy slipping on a pile of wet leaves on Sakharov Avenue, the slow sighs of waking men and women. So few voices. Far too few.
Shaking melancholy away, I get up. It is a good morning to fly, and so I rise towards the cloudy, dawn-lit sky at a leisurely pace, a hundred meters a second. No need to let air friction burn away my fragile civilian clothes. This is a vacation.
I’ve always thought of Kosmograd as home. Below me, the concrete giants of the city center rise half a mile to the sky, like the ribs of some huge and ancient creature: a dead titan of the past eaten by scavengers. The shadows of the buildings are like long, skeletal fingers in the morning light. With a glance I scan the vast steel framework of the Space Center, the cracked face of the dam, the regular polygons of the colhose fields. All like the familiar face of a comrade to me, a friend who has been scarred and hurt and grown old before his time.
I, of course, am unmarked by years. And Kosmograd is not my true home. I see my true home every night when I look up at the stars. It is not easy, even with my enhanced vision: two million parsecs is a long way for light to travel and a Dyson sphere made of strange matter is not very bright to begin with. I’ve only been there once, for a fleeting moment, and the transparent spires and the huge shapes moving among them seemed alien.
Perhaps I should have stayed.
I think of dead dreams and feel a chill that has nothing to do with temperature.
For the rest of the morning I circle over the city, taking my time visiting places that bring back memories. In the old days I would not have had the time: at least once in five minutes I would have swept down -a red streak - to lift up a tractor stuck in the mud in the fields, or to stop a capitalist plot, or to fight a short bout with some Western superhuman eager to find his match in the Wonder of Kosmograd. Barely time for lunch and a cup of tea with Nadia in the afternoon. But now there is peace, at least. Peace and age and death.
There is the Silent Plaza where Kali killed eight hundred people and gave me one of the few true scars I bear. I hover over it for a long, quiet minute. There is a small bookshop I used to frequent - now closed, its windows nailed shut. There is the Space Center, rusty and abandoned, haunted by memories of burning liquid hydrogen and disasters narrowly averted. There is the Vilenkin Bridge, which I held up for an hour the day the Tau Cetians shook the earth with their seismic bombs. There is my statue, quite striking in its likeness, and it saddens me that in all likelihood it will be dust when my skin is still smooth and young.
I spend the afternoon sitting in a small cafeteria I find at the edge of the Red Knight Memorial Plaza. Sipping coffee, I break out my M7 commlink and review various crises taking place around the globe, content that they are being handled without need for my intervention. I chat to the owner, a small, bright-eyed old woman, and she tells me a tale of Tungusk saving his husband, a construction worker at a Kosmotower that collapsed, fifty years ago. She delights in showing me some framed newspaper clippings. I smile and nod.
For the evening, there is the graveyard.
I visit Nadia.
The blue silicate flowers on her grave appear to be healthy - the only ones of their kind in the Solar System - and I remember the day I brought her one for the first time. I had been away for an entire week, exploring Brane-2 with Ithuriel and Baikonur. I kneel and touch their crystalline petals, remembering the color of her eyes when she got angry. I can still count the receptor cells in them, hear the rhythm of her heartbeats, feel the fine grooves in her fingertips resting against my chest at night as I listened to the soft EEG music of her dreams. What a curse memory is.
Like so many times before, I find myself wondering why my makers gave me tear ducts. I dig my fingers into the wet rich earth of the grave and curse that I cannot give life to dead things, cities or women. Industrial diamonds crack between my fingers, I can swim in the heart of a sun, I am the strongest being on this little planet. And yet I am weak.
For the millionth time I think how easy it would be to go away, to let vacuum dry my tears, to travel light years in search of new dreams to defend and if not that, sleep in the cold heavy embrace of a black hole. And for the millionth time I hear what Nadia would say.
“Nikolai”, she would say angrily, chidingly. “Nikolai, they need you. You are here for a reason. Not for dreams. Not for me. For all of us.”
“I know, Nadia”, I whisper soundlessly. “I know.”
Then the cold autumn rain starts pouring down on the transparent blue flowers and me, and I walk away.
Night falls when I leave Kosmograd. I rise to the stratosphere at full speed, giving the city a shooting star and a wish for a farewell. I float in twilight for a long time, watching the last rays of the sun disappear behind the curve of the Earth. Kosmograd lights up far below me, a little mandala of bright dots in the dark bulk of Russia. I think of an artificial world half a cosmos away and light in a dead woman’s eyes.
I say goodbye and fly west, knowing that I will return.