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Road from Suzdal — Chapter 33

Chapter 33: Water, Wood, Wife

When he squinted past the inevitable damage inflicted by heavy equipment around the site and the scrap heaps and shacks of the small village, Rudy recognized that the Ring started in a natural haven, offering welcome restorative greenery and granite and clear blue sky to workers coming out of the tunnel. But the particle physicists who would come to use this machine wouldn’t camp in tents and scratch formulas in the dirt and snow. Galina Filipovna would need a space like her classroom with its big chalkboards. Her colleagues, professors from the Institute and scholars visiting from across Russia and all over the world, would need similar spaces where they could work and meet and share ideas. They would need places to eat, drink, and rest. They might even bring families. Some might live here, as Rudy now did, half-time, bunking often during the work week in a drafty old dacha that he bought and repaired with his own savings, a two-room shack with a shed for his motorcycle, just a five-minute walk from porch to foreman’s trailer, just five minutes the other way to the general store on the highway that sold benzin, eggs, shashlik, and goat milk. Just like the man building the Ring, at least some of the scholars using the Ring would see the benefits of not losing an hour of productive time to a daily drive from Irkutsk.

But the TSK was silent on human accommodations outside of access points and underground control rooms, and Galina Filipovna’s master plan left such buildings in general terms, with projections of staff and visitor numbers but no blueprints. No one had considered how the Ring might change Goryachiy Klyuch or what role the village might play in supporting the great machine and its scholars.

Before crews finished digging the final kilometers of the tunnel, Rudy started contemplating the human accommodations the site would need. The supercollider remained primary—offices and lodging had no purpose without a functioning particle accelerator—and for the first few months, Rudy focused on translating the TSK into tangible and accelerating results. As he got his grasp of the daily operations and personnel needs of the project and pieced together the scattered and sketchy records the former boss had left, Rudy estimated that at least 30% of the previous budget had been filched or frittered away. Rudy drove the project into deeper deficits his first two months as he repaired or replaced neglected equipment and stockpiled bargain-priced installation-phase materials. By the end of November, his investments and his bookkeeping were paying off, putting the project back on schedule and under budget projections.

With this new cushion in the budget, Rudy could give some attention to projects beyond the TSK and Galina’s vision.

With Galina Filipovna’s blessing, Rudy began redirecting some of the small surpluses to a category he carefully documented as “Community Development.” During the Christmas break, he sent a crew, working on Ring Group time, to the village kindergarten to repair the roof and reinsulate the school. Children had been writing their exercises in mittens; when they returned after Christmas, they and their teachers could work bare-handed, in shirtsleeves. Rudy himself installed a small computer network with Internet access for the teachers and fixed a stove with two dead burners in the school kitchen. He also assigned one of his men to make a pass through the village after each significant snowfall with the camp snowplow and clear all ten streets. Some of his crew lived in Goryachiy Klyuch, so it made sense to make it easier for them to get to work. But Rudy envisioned making the village appeal to more of the workers as a place to live.

Over the months, Rudy’s efficiencies and savings allowed more local investments. After the spring thaw, Rudy repurposed the equipment they’d used to dig ventilation shafts to dig two new water wells for the village. Residents shared a dozen shallow wells, half of which were crumbling and all of which produced water of questionable quality. His own cabin’s water flowed sporadically and tasted bitter; he suspected the logging company whose camp the Ring Group now occupied had polluted the village water supply. After careful consultation with the Institute geologists (who were thrilled to have a chance to visit the Ring base and study the water table), Rudy directed his men to build two deep wells north and west of town, up the hill, along with a million-gallon storage tank. Running trunk lines off the main down each street and connections to every household that signed up took some creative financing outside the Ring budget (but no permitting—the village had no formal governing council). Rudy recruited an environmental scientist at the Institute to find a Baikal region public health grant to fund that portion of the project and ensure villagers could connect without cost.

Rudy himself canvassed the town, knocking on every door, speaking with every resident who answered, leaving letters for those who didn’t, explaining the water project. He assured residents that access to the new well water would remain the responsibility of the Institute for the duration of the construction and beyond, for as long as the wells produced potable water, and the geology department had estimated the deeper, untapped aquifer would last for the foreseeable future, even factoring in the increase in water consumption from an operating Ring and the community of scientists that Rudy expected would double the population of the village, at least during business hours.

By the end of the summer—Rudy’s second summer as foreman—80% of the residents of Goryachiy Klyuch had cleaner water at stronger and steadier pressure.

The 20% of Goryachiy Klyuchniks who stuck with their wells included Ivan Ivanovich, an old logger, retired ten years, who lived on the northern edge of town, just two houses down from the first connection to the new north community well. The old logger’s house featured a front porch and shutters and trim along the eaves carved with flowers, bears, mountains, streams, eagles, and crossed axes, each image unique.

Ivan Ivanovich was not an old crank. He was a big man, still muscular from chopping wood every day for his stove and the stoves and stockpiles of every neighbor in wheelbarrow distance. When Rudy visited in June, Ivan Ivanovich invited him inside to sit and talk. Rudy got to see more ornate woodwork, all hand-hewn, smooth, and richly varnished, and vivid photos of the forest and mountains and lake on every wall. Ivan Ivanovich’s eyes were as active as his hands and shoulders, attentive to Rudy’s explanation of the village water project, curious about some details of earthwork and new construction at the Ring base, the site of the logging camp where he’d worked most of his adult life.

“Your water project sounds useful,” Ivan Ivanovich said. “But I want no part of it.”

“May I ask why not?”

“Yes, you may.” Ivan Ivanovich teased Rudy with a few seconds of silence. As Rudy began to open his mouth, Ivan Ivanovich held up his big right hand. “Change will happen. Your… Ring… will change the countryside. You will change this place, as you have explained, mostly for the better.”

Ivan Ivanovich sat back in his chair. His eyes went to a framed photograph on the wall near his chair, Ivan himself, younger but not much, his white-haired arms embracing a round, radiant blonde in a blue flowery dress. They were on a beach. The wind was making a mess of the woman’s hair. She was laughing and reaching one hand up, maybe to make some futile attempt to manage her hair, maybe to pat Ivan Ivanovich’s cheek. He sat in the picture behind her, eyes closed as her locks flew about his face. He, too, was smiling. The woman’s hair might escape his grip, but not the woman herself.

“But I have had enough change. I want no more, not yours or anyone else’s.”

Rudy was looking at the photo along with Ivan. “Your wife?” Rudy asked.

The old logger raised a hand toward the picture, like a master of ceremonies introducing the star of his show. “Margarita Ruslanovna. She is gone.”

Rudy knew nothing of Margarita Ruslanovna but that photo and the soft tone of her husband’s voice. But her absence, the loss of that radiance, the loss of the chance to meet the woman herself and see her rekindle the light in photo-Ivan’s eyes, stung Rudy immediately. “She’s… beautiful,” Rudy murmured. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t….” Rudy considered the words he would use to excuse himself and leave Ivan Ivanovich’s house.

“Don’t be embarrassed,” Ivan said. “She was beautiful. And refined, and resolute, my Margarita. I retired to spend all my time with her. We had the best seven years of our lives, gardening, hiking, camping on the big lake. She took photos, I chopped wood.”

Ivan Ivanovich looked past Rudy out his window, toward one of his woodpiles. “Come again some weekend, when you are not busy changing our world. Maybe I show you more photos. Maybe we chop wood.”

Rudy didn’t press Ivan Ivanovich further to connect to the new water supply. The project didn’t depend on local buy-in for viability: he had to build the wells and mains for the Ring no matter how many local users signed up. Rudy just wanted every villager to have the option to share in the improvements the great science facility would bring to the area.

But he did take Ivan Ivanovich up on his invitation. One Friday in July, riding back from inspecting the new pump at the north well (the original pump burned out after just a month in service, and nobody, not Rudy, Maksim, or anyone else on the crew, could figure out what went wrong), Rudy saw Ivan Ivanovich in his yard making showers of sparks as he sharpened his axes with an electric grinder. Rudy stopped his motorcycle alongside Ivan Ivanovich’s green wooden fence. Ivan Ivanovich stopped sharpening and looked up. “Waterworks working yet?”

“Steady flow now from both wells, good pressure all the way to the base. Want help chopping wood this weekend?”

Ivan tilted a warm axe head toward Rudy and the tree line visible from his front yard. “I have an extra axe; the forest has an extra tree. Come after breakfast tomorrow.” Rudy nodded and rode back to base to finish the weekly report for Galina, then went to his dacha, where he made salad from garden greens dropped off by the kindergarten teacher, skimmed the newspaper from the gas station, and started reading the new Victor Pelevin novel he’d bought at the beginning of summer in Irkutsk. He read until the sun set after ten, and slept soundly with his windows all wide open.

On Saturday, he breakfasted early and walked across the village—Forest Street, Teacher’s Street, Communist Street—to Ivan Ivanovich’s house. The sun had already topped the trees. The old logger was outside, putting his axes and two chainsaws in the back of his green UAZ Bukhanka. The vehicle had begun life as a van, but Ivan Ivanovich himself, Rudy learned on the drive into the forest, had cut off the roof and walls behind the driver compartment, cut and welded the roof panel behind the front seats to seal the compartment, cut in and installed the windows from the rear doors for visibility, and stripped the back three quarters of the vehicle to make a truck bed. He’d cut down the rear doors and kept the bottom halves as a split tailgate.

Ivan Ivanovich drove just a couple kilometers past the Ring base and out into the forest, up an old logging road that had diminished to a couple rough tracks in the surging brush. Ivan Ivanovich drove with typical Russian lack of concern for vehicular verticality. Rudy held on tightly, and they made it to a gentle ridge with a mix of young and old trees, birches, aspens, mountain ash, and pine, amidst stumps and deadfall. Ivan Ivanovich stepped out, surveyed the forest, and thumped a few adult trees with his palm. The sound was small amidst the chattering of leaves in the breeze that stirred the canopy above. “You take this one,” he said, patting a thick birch about fifteen meters tall. He pointed to another birch, a little smaller, on the opposite side of the trail. “I’ll take that one.”

They felled the trees side by side along the path. They spent half an hour stripping limbs from the trunks with the chainsaws, throwing the brush aside, and chopping the trunk and usable branches into manageable lengths. They loaded lighter branches at the front, bigger logs at the back. They piled wood high, as high as the cab.

They had nowhere else to be that morning, and the morning was calm and fragrant with moss and wildflowers and pine sap and now moist sawdust, so they took their time and talked a lot.

“So you’ll be smashing atoms with your Ring?” the old logger asked.

“Not me personally—I don’t work with anything smaller than nuts and bolts.”

“Nuts and bolts of the universe—that’s for the physicists to break down, yes?”

“Yeah, they’ll smash atoms, and parts of atoms. I think they’ll make new particles, too.”

“Fission and fusion…isn’t that how they make nuclear explosions? Will your Ring blow us up?”

Rudy paused, then set a log upright on the big stump he’d been using as a chopping platform, swung his awe high and wide, and split the log neatly in two. He retrieved each half, split each again, then stacked the pieces in Ivan Ivanovich’s truck.

“I hadn’t thought of it that way… but… hey, they have particle accelerators all over the place, in Chicago, California, Switzerland. They don’t blow up.”

“Reasonable.” Ivan Ivanovich fell silent, sized up the log in front of him, and brought his axe down. Halves fell away. He wrestled the axe free of the stump below and rested his hands on the butt of the handle. “But why don’t they blow up? How do we know your Ring won’t turn Lake Baikal into Chernobyl?”

“I—how should I know? I’m just building it, not using it.”

“Do you always build things you know not what they do?”

Rudy stared at his chopping block and the axe marks criss-crossing it. He chewed on the problem Ivan Ivanovich posed.

“It’s… different. Power plants and… and bombs… need a whole bunch of atoms”—he held out his dusty hand, balled in a fist—”like a ball of uranium. A particle splits, hits more particles, hits more particles, chain reaction, and…” Rudy vibrated his fist, then spread his hand, a silent explosion. Then he held up both hands, extended on finger from each. “A particle accelerator only throws a few particles at a time.” He moved the fingers apart, then brought the tips together. “Galina says sometimes you see a little flash of light when particles collide, but that’s it. No sound, no force to rattle the walls. She says she wouldn’t know anything happened without really sensitive instruments.”

“So the Ring can’t kill us?”

“Your Bukhanka is more likely to kill us than the Ring is.”

“Or make a black hole? Or open up an alternate universe from which space Nazis will invade?”

“Is that what a guy has time to think about in retirement?”

“I hope the physicists are thinking about them before retirement.”

Rudy looked up at the sky. “I guess black holes are like bombs; they need a lot more mass, like a whole star, right? But alternate universes? Well, you’ve got me there.”

“So maybe you fire up the Ring, the particles go splat just right, and I wake up to find my Margarita from another universe in my bed, sleeping and warm?”

Rudy leaned back on Ivan’s truck, thinking of the photo of the woman on the beach in Ivan Ivanovich’s arms. If Margarita Ruslanovna were here… Rudy imagined Ivan’s wife crowded between them in the Bukhanka, then wandering around their little Saturday morning logging camp, taking photos of flowers and moss and cardinals and branches fracturing the sky. Then, joltingly, he thought of Ksenia, who was not gone like Margarita Ruslanovna, but whom he imagined now walking alongside Margarita, maybe with a camera of her own, maybe pausing to comment on or make a poem of Ivan’s wild interpretations of particle physics. Rudy thought of Ken, who would have loved to be there chopping wood with them… of Carter, whose big wrestler arms might have felled as many trees in morning as Ivan and Rudy combined…. Ken and Carter and Lily and Brenda were gone, really gone, like Ivan’s wife, gone, really gone, not retrievable by any magic… but Rudy thought of Ksenia again, in Astrakhan, yes, but mostly in Suzdal and Sudislavl and Galich, on the bike, at the falls, at the lake.

The magic of Galina Filipovna’s machine was to understand the universe, not remake it.

Rudy looked at Ivan Ivanovich’s blue eyes glistening in the flickers of sunshine that broke through the rustling trees. He felt a little ashamed to be sinking into his own recollections. The people Rudy had lost, the people Rudy would bring back with a machine turned magic, he’d known for a couple weeks. Ivan Ivanovich ached for a companion he’d known for decades.

Rudy readied another log. “If I hear we can do that,” he said, aiming his axe, “I’ll throw the switch myself.”