The Great Glass Sea Page 2

  Soon there were five floating in the night sky above Petroplavilsk. Petrovskaya Plavilnya, Peter’s Foundry. Once the city had clanged and glowed with the workyards of the tsars—monstrous anchors forged for Baltic men-of-war, Great Catherine’s cannons rolled out to disembody Turks—but for many years it had manufactured little but melancholia. A place of concrete buildings, busted piers, skeletons of trees beneath streetcar wires scratched into sky, graveyards gray with snow, the absurdity of crocuses, of even the color purple, of old people standing in their underwear on the shore of the still-frozen lake beneath the cries of gulls, the birds’ solitary drifting and sudden frenzied flocking like the days of the work-hungry men, their job-starved wives.

  That was how it was after perestroika. That was how it was until the mirrors came. Until the oligarch proposed to make an experiment of the city, the first place on earth illumined by the sun for every hour of every day of all the seasons of the year. He would take the most depressed, torpid town in Russia and grow its productivity as if beneath a heat lamp, sprout a work rate unparalleled in the world; it would be a hothouse of output, a field of ceaseless yield. No long months of winter brooding, darkness drawn over Petroplavilsk like goose down. No twilight melancholy, no dreaminess of dusk. No midnight urge to lie on dewy grass between the trolley lines inhaling summer’s scent. No evening-ushered crime spike. No streetlamps. No car headlights. No night.

  The first zerkalo kosmosa lit only the center of the city. It painted gleam on the bronze pates of scowling heroes, flared pilfered sunlight off the memorial cannons and stacks of iron shot. The people of Petroplavilsk gathered at the light’s circumference, their backs bathed in blackness, their faces aglow. Some crept to the edge, their hands held as if to dip their fingers in the light, faint shadows blooming beneath their bodies, their edges sharpening to noonlike, until they found themselves bathed whole in the caromed sun. In those first nights of that first mirror the city’s heart thumped to the sounds of celebrations. Parents brought their children. Sons carried in their dying mothers. No one slept. They would lie in bed looking through their windows at the glow, or shut their curtains and lie there thinking of it.

  The second zerkalo lit the rest of the city. The third, the sprawl of concrete apartments to the west. The fourth, the eastern same. The fifth one lit the dockyards and a swath of the sea-sized lake.

  Fishing boats trawled through daylight and mirror-light, the droning of their engines incessant as the waves, their crews pulling twelve-hour shifts, clambering aboard in midday brightness, alighting onto docks in a midnight like a low-watt noon. Along the Kosha River the old ironworks roared through the semblance of sunset, the factories on the Solovinka thudding into sunrise, their rumble unrelieved by the passage of days, weeks, months. Sleep was freed from nature’s hours. Breakfast was what happened before work. Stores never closed. On once-empty shelves new goods appeared: prewashed greens, low-fat avocados. On the way home from work women bought machines for cleansing tableware, shaving tools that ran off batteries; their husbands picked up suppers cooked by strangers’ hands.

  In the last hour of nature’s light, as the planet rolled away from the sun, the zerkala rose off the eastern horizon, their refracted glow red as the sky in the west. People called it voskhod zerkala. Mirror rise. From then to dawn the satellites drifted overhead, a sliding swatch of stars, their mirrors ever angling to cant the sun’s light down on the same circle of earth. And as the first zerkala followed their path over the world’s western edge, the bank of mirrors behind them took up the task, and then the zerkala behind them, and behind them, all through the hours that once were night.

  No longer. Dusk to dawn the city was eerie with a luminescence like a storm-smothered day with shadows sharp as noon. The planners had hoped a people used to the north’s white nights might adapt with ease, that it would feel little different from summer’s solstice: the long wait for dusk, the anxiousness that built by the hour until at last the sliver of night would drop and puncture it, pressure whooshing out like the long day’s sigh. Except beneath the zerkala there was no puncture, no release. Not even summer’s few hours of dark. And in the fall, the cold days drew behind them no blanket of night. Winter never grew its black coat. And what was there for spring to shed? From what would it wake?

  Outside the spot of erased night, small villages slept on in their enduring dark. Beyond them lay the woods. Vast lands of larch and fir, aspens and birch. All fall, while their canopies turned the colors of the sunsets, while night yawned wide above their shedding leaves, while branch tips hardened against the coming cold, each tree beyond the zerkala’s reach must have wondered at the way, inside that circle of light, the others stayed green. Their leaves still on their branches. Where, when winter hit, they rotted.

  In spring, the stretching days woke those who’d slumbered, dormant, beneath nature’s blanketing dark, to an eerie sight: beneath the zerkala light all their brethren stood dead or dying, stuck in winter-broken bodies, not a single bud. Even the evergreens had succumbed: the tops all winterburned, the bottoms sprouting suckers, their shapes forever changed.

  In villages, gardens ground to a halt, field crops grew confused. Barley forgot to form seed heads. Pea shoots paused preflowering. Where tubers had been sown the soil waited. A few farmers tried to hang on, to pasture milk cows on clover that didn’t bloom, to grow the few things that seemed able to withstand the constant light: plots of cucumbers and onions, a few patches of strawberries. While all throughout the city the people watched their old trees swapped for ones grown in the Consortium’s great greenhouse. Park gardeners planted beds with Consortium-cultivated flowers. Seeds developed in the laboratories of the oligarch went on sale.

  Though even the researchers who had found the light-sensing gene, who’d flicked off the molecular switch, couldn’t ease the panic that coursed through the mice, tree frogs, bats. Voles were hunted as if with spotlights. Housecats grew fat on their kills. New prey presented itself to dogs. Out beside the soon-doomed woods fields became feasting grounds for foxes, falcons, their hunting an unimpeded bliss.

  But why were the snowy owls booming their mating calls, displaying their wings, when their spring fledglings were barely out of their nests? Why, so long after spring had gone, were the warblers and wagtails stirred to sing so often and so loud? The geese watched the time for flying south come near, still waiting for flight feathers to grow. Deer didn’t mate. Bears browsed lazily as in midsummer, oblivious to their approaching sleep. And when the cold arrived, did they hear their stomachs groan? Did a shiver run up the flanks of the wolves beneath their summer fur? First snows came, and how strange to see the silhouettes of arctic foxes that had forgotten to turn white, to watch them try to creep upon hares equally unable to hide. And how frenzied the white world seemed then, teeming with ermines and polecats and minks, the panic of their dark shapes.

  All that was before the rumors of a dozen more mirrors going up, the confirmation on the news, the oligarch’s oaths to turn the tsar’s foundry into the country’s garden, Petroplavilsk into Rossiyasad, before the Oranzheria. The mammoth solarium collared the city, a necklace of unceasing gleam. From underneath, it was a second sky of glass. Over fields sewn year-round with engineered seeds, the sunlight streamed down, yanked up sprouts at twice the speed: rapeseed, sunflowers, barley, rye. In air so humid it fogged their throats, workers picked enormous soy pods, cucumbers engorged with warmth and light, harvested ceaselessly, whether the rest of the land lay in bloom or under snow.

  By the time the rumored new mirrors were seen one night—a constellation of seventeen fresh stars rising in the sky beside the five expected ones—the Oranzheria was big as the lake, its clear walls encasing the city, its vast roof flat and wide as Otseva’s surface of winter ice. And it was growing. Through mirror-light and sunlight, in unceasing shifts, twelve hours at a time, twelve thousand laborers swarmed beneath it, over it, at its fringes, every day. A quarter of all the workforce of the city. The first tim
e new hires rode the buses out they crowded at the windows, eyes widening, cheekbones knocking glass. Four stories up, the edge of the Oranzheria cut across the old sky like a second horizon. When the shift switch aligned with sunset, the strip of glass went roseatted, as if dusk had cracked open to show the nearing workers a sliver of some more colorful world. As they passed beneath, it reddened above them, deepened . . . and then began to brighten again as the rising mirrors’ light replaced the last of the sun’s.

  In those first years atop the Oranzheria, back when Dima and Yarik still worked beside each other on the same shift, the same crew, there was something about being so high up, so close to the sky, that spurred the brothers’ dreams. Laying lines of adhesive along strips of steel where the glass panes would be laid down, bent over their silicone guns, they eased the ache in their necks with talk of their uncle’s old chicken coop, of how many hens it would hold, how many Russian geese, American turkeys, laughed so hard at their own attempts at warbling that their gasket lines wriggled in parallel gaffes. One brother on each end of a half-culvert, they debated the merits of wheat and barley, rye and flax, wound up lost in memories of crickets leaping in the communal fields, openmouthed boys chasing the bugs as if to catch them on their tongues. Fitting the trough into the long line of a rain canal, they talked of how they would one day do it again, of how this time the whole harvest would be theirs, the fields theirs, the farm.

  The last time they’d worked together was more than six months ago. And that day they had not even been working, not when the drumming began, heavy as sudden rain, on the top of Dima’s hard hat. Yarik stopped, stared. Watching him, Dima started to rise from his crouch. The drumming ceased. In its place: the weight of a hand pressed down.

  “Why get up?” Dima stayed squatted beneath the foreman’s sarcasm. “I wouldn’t want to disturb such an engrossing conversation.” The fingers drummed again. “Maybe, you want me to bring you some tea?”

  Turning his head beneath the patter, Dima looked past the foreman’s legs, across the high glass plain, to the yawning hole a ladder hatch had sprung. It huffed with the heat of the world below, thick and shaking as jet engine breath. And with it, climbing up out of the hatch: a man in a silvery suit. Others were already up, clustered there, four pairs of sunglasses watching Dima back.

  The only one not wearing shades was the man coming out of the hatch. He rose into the stillness of the standing others, only their suits moving in the wind, his own beginning to whiffle as he made the surface in a movement fluid as the rippling of his sleeves, no pause even as he stepped out of the hatch onto the glass, eyes sweeping the scene, stride already taking him through the group, towards the foreman, the brothers.

  Then he was there, between them, looking down at the glass around his boots. They were boots dyed the blue of Lake Otseva on a deep-skied day, made of squamous skin that might have been peeled off some creature of that inland sea, toes like two serpents’ heads, heels heavy as hooves. The man’s slacks rippled, his jacket snapped. From his neck, two strings hung, weighted by metal nibs, their leather the blue of his boots, the same color—Dima squinted up—that seemed to tinge his eyes. Except, as Dima looked at them, they grew more gray. Around them, the man’s long hair was swept straight back, nearly to his shoulders, bleached blond as his mustache, his golden goatee. His face was tanned, soft, something about the combination so unnatural it made Dima want to look away. But the eyes that he had thought were gray, he saw now—stranger still—had begun to shimmer with a hint of gold.

  The man’s gaze flicked back to the glass below his boots, between the brothers. There the surface was streaked with yellow scrawl. It was bad enough that they were pausing more and more in the movements they were paid to make, bad enough their chatter had caught the ears and slowed the actions of the workers nearby, but to have been bent over their grease pencils, lost in a moment of no work at all, in dreaming up the layout of the milking parlor they’d reconstruct from their uncle’s abandoned barn, right at the moment when the man had come through the hatch, the man who paid the men who paid the men who paid their foreman, who paid them, the man who said to them now, “What’s this?”

  On Dima’s hard hat, the foreman’s fingers beat their tattoo.

  Yarik was already rising from his crouch, standing up into the spill of his own apology, when the man gave him a look that cut him quiet.

  “Are you some cowboy?” the man said. Silence. He turned to them both. “A couple Cossacks?”

  “They’re just—”

  “No.” The man shot the foreman a smile that shut him up. “I’ll guess.” He contemplated the grease-pencil scribblings. “A blueprint?” He raised his eyebrows, scanned their faces. “For new sector expansion? A brainstorm of improvements to our equipment?” With a silver-tipped toe he poked at Dima’s drawing of herringbone stalls. “These are the snow dispersal chutes?” Traced the lines Dima had drawn to show how cows could be arranged. “These are slides to more efficiently direct the shovel-loads? To prevent the spillage onto the crops?” His boot sole hovered over the milking parlor. He planted it, traced with his other toe the lines Yarik had drawn—arrows showing better access to the udders in a retrofitted tie-stall barn—the metal tip scraping against the glass, the gesture twisting the man into a strangely dainty pose. “Here,” he insisted, “you’re trying to solve our problems with ventilation when ice builds up.” He made a little circle with his toe. The foreman looked away, as if his boss had donned a tutu. Stepping from holding corral to chutes with quiet exclamations of surprise and pleasure—“I see. Very clever. Top-notch work.”—he seemed a small child making his way through a hopscotch game.

  Until he stopped. Crouching between the brothers, he reached out, placed a hand over the foreman’s drumming fingers. The patter quit.

  Dima could feel the weight of both men’s hands, then the lightening as the foreman’s withdrew, then the other’s redoubled, pressing down again. That close, he could see the soft red corners of the man’s eyes, the gleam in them. “Look at all these fuckers.” The man spoke low, as if just for Dima’s ears, his gaze roving the other laborers who had shifted their work close to better hear, the men in suits stepping nearer to see, the foreman trying to look like he wasn’t straining to listen, too. “Prairie dogging fuckers,” the man said. He threw a grin to each of the brothers, two quick tosses made to force a catch. Yarik was still standing, but he crouched down as if to scoop it up, and the three were level, low, close.

  “Fucking fish-fooders,” the man said, and laughed. “Come on, you cowboys. Tell me. Am I right? About the snow chute? The ventilation? You were recontextualizing the whole Oranzheria, yes? Inventors,” the man declared. “Our own Korolev! Our own Sikorsky!”

  Dima was already nodding, about to tell the man what he wanted to hear, when Yarik said, instead, “We weren’t inventing anything.”

  “OK,” the man said.

  “We were only thinking.”

  “About?”

  “Tourism.”

  The man beamed. “Loop me in, cowboy,” he said. “Give me the helicopter view.”

  Dima could not imagine how his brother did it: looked straight into those eyes and laid out a lie as intricate as any of Dyadya Avya’s tales. Some sunsets, Yarik said, he and Dima were overcome by the way the wide glass surface broke lightning into a thousand reflections crackling across the panes; how, staring down, you could fit yourself into a V of geese flying above; when mist rolled over the Oranzheria it was as if the cloudbanks they had dreamed of walking on as children were suddenly made real.

  “All this,” Yarik said, “and nobody but us to see it. And we see it all for free. But”—he paused—“if there were viewing platforms . . .” Pointing to the stalls as if they were windows through which visitors would watch the magic shows of hail, he said, “Here’s the route they could take. Here, a tram that would ride ten meters up along the underside of the glass.” And by the time he was laying out a vision for buses to bring out the p
eople of Petroplavilsk, the man had stopped following the drawings. He was looking only at Yarik’s face.

  Watching, Dima thought he heard a humming sound. Low and quiet. There, then gone. Only when he saw his brother’s eyes flick to the man, did he realize where the noise was coming from. Yarik stopped talking. The man stopped the sound. Yarik began again. The sound, again: louder, heavier. The man opened his mouth, let the noise expand into a low, wavering, mournful vowel, round and long and nearly sung.

  The foreman stepped back. The suits who had started forward stopped. Their boss stayed crouched, looking back and forth between the brothers, grinning. Nobody moved, nobody spoke. Yarik cleared his throat, looked at the scribbles on the glass, once more began to talk of the money that could be made. And it was only then, when the blue-booted man sat back on his haunches, lifted his face to the sky, and let out the groaning moan like something boiled in his belly, a bellow fit for an animal twice his size, that Dima realized what it was: a moo. A cow’s moo. The man was mooing.

  The next day, the brothers arrived at work to find their foreman come to send one of them home. Not fired, the man said, just rescheduled. Separated. Which one would switch from the natural-lit shift to the mirror-lit, who would get on the bus and return in a dozen hours just as the other was getting done, he left to them to decide. Dima stood there, silent. So Yarik chose the daytime (If I’m only home when the kids are up I’ll never screw my wife) and the new crew (Dima, who’ll keep an eye on Mama during the day?) assigned to ground-level jobs. They were to work on different planes—Dima high up laying the glass, Yarik below in the stanchion crew—at opposite times. And life would split in two: the time of them together, the time of them apart.