A History of What Comes Next

FURTHER READING (Not as boring as it sounds, I swear.)

The story’s over (for now). I learned a ton writing this book. I knew little of the space race when I began, nothing of rocket science. Writing in the past was the biggest challenge. Basically, nothing exists and women can’t do anything. When were women allowed to open a bank account on their own? Was there duct tape in 1945? Was “alpha dog” a thing back then? That said, I love research, and digging into history was a lot of fun. I thought I would share some interesting bits about the people and events that make up this book and throw in some reading suggestions if you want to know more, or if you’re looking to pass time while waiting for the next book.

Rather than give you a long list of books, most of which you’re never going to read, I picked relatively short documents from good sources that you can read online for free. Of course, just about everything and everyone I mention in the book has a Wikipedia entry.

The story begins with Sarah working for the OSS, the Office of Strategic Services. It is, of course, a real thing, and in many ways the ancestor of the CIA. You’ve seen them or read about them before. In Cloak and Dagger (1946) by Fritz Lang, Gary Cooper plays an OSS agent who—drumroll—has to exfiltrate a German scientist. Indiana Jones worked for them, according to Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, and Diana Prince, a.k.a. Wonder Woman, works for Steve Trevor at the OSS. The great thing about the organization is that they were the first espionage agency of their kind,[1] as in there weren’t earlier ones that they could model themselves after. They made it up as they went along. The result is sometimes amazing, sometimes really, really weird. They made gizmos and gadgets. Think Sean Connery’s James Bond: cameras in the shape of a matchbox, playing cards that hid secret maps, the ever-useful compass hidden inside a uniform button, and explosives disguised as just about everything.

Their hiring practices were interesting, to say the least. They hired baseball catcher Moe Berg after his career with the Red Sox ended, and sent him to Zurich to meet German physicist Werner Heisenberg, to ascertain how close the Germans were to the atomic bomb, and to shoot him if he thought they were close to a breakthrough. Famous chef Julia Child was apparently too tall to enlist in the Women’s Army Corps, and so she joined the OSS instead. There, she assisted in developing a shark repellent for the navy. All this is to say that I felt fairly comfortable having them send nineteen-year-old Mia on a mission in Germany.

There were real heroes working for the OSS, men and women braver than any of us—well, me anyway—but in some respects, the agency also resembled what my ten-year-old would come up with if I asked him to start his own spy thing. If you want to read about the OSS, I suggest the publications section on the CIA website.[2] You should also look up Virginia Hall. She’s literally a superhero.

Operation Paperclip has to be one of the most famous secret operations in history. Its purpose was to extract German scientists and to get them to work for the US. Why Paperclip? The way I heard it, the US put together a big pile-o’-files on German scientists, and researchers would put a paper clip on the ones they thought were of interest. The operation was… let’s just say controversial. People often talk about Wernher von Braun because he makes for a more sympathetic figure, but hiring people working for Hitler in Nazi Germany significantly increases your chances of ending up with actual Nazis. I won’t speculate as to these people’s beliefs or motivations, but von Braun wasn’t the only one working at NASA who once wore the SS uniform. Kurt Debus, director of the Launch Operations Center at Cape Canaveral, was a member of both Hitler’s Brownshirts and the SS. He worked with von Braun at Peenemünde. The gigantic Vertical Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral was designed by Bernhard Tessmann, who helped set up the facilities at Peenemünde. Tessmann was one of the people von Braun asked for help in hiding the V-2 research documents Himmler had ordered destroyed.

The Saturn V rocket, which sent the Apollo astronauts to the moon, was designed by former SS Sturmbannführer von Braun, and Arthur Rudolph, who joined the Nazi Party in 1931 and later the Brownshirts. These are the more presentable people the US recruited. Then you have people like Kurt Blome, director of the Nazi biological warfare program. This guy did some really nasty stuff I won’t describe here (but you’ve already guessed where he got his test subjects from). He was later hired by the US to work on… chemical warfare.

This book begins with Mia and von Braun during their escape from Germany. Writing it was super fun, because it’s all true, more or less. Accounts of the events differ slightly from source to source, even for something that happened not that long ago, but the gist of it is always the same. Von Braun and some of his people decide they want to surrender to the US. The Russians are coming, and they have to leave Peenemünde. They have a bunch of conflicting orders to pick from, and they choose to go to Bleicherode, but they’re worried about their gigantic convoy getting stopped. This is where it gets crazy. Yes, they just happen to have a box of misprinted letterhead on hand, and they use it to make fake papers for this VzBV secret project. Somewhere along the way, von Braun’s driver falls asleep at the wheel, and he breaks his arm in a crash. They get to Bleicherode, where they meet Dornberger. They receive orders to burn all their research and take the top five hundred scientists to a camp in Oberammergau. They hide all the research documents inside a mountain instead, because why not. Once in Oberammergau, they convince the SS major in charge that they should disperse in the nearby towns. From there, they use the VzBV letterhead to requisition supplies and go wait it out at a resort in the Alps until von Braun’s brother Magnus runs into a certain PFC Schneikert while riding his bicycle. The American soldier points his gun at him, and Magnus says, in broken English: “My name is Magnus von Braun. My brother invented the V-2. We want to surrender!”

I think what I like most about the von Braun story is that he did it all himself, as far as I can tell. Operation Paperclip wasn’t always pretty. Truman authorized one thousand German scientists to be held in “temporary, limited military custody.” That usually meant scouting and then kidnapping people. Von Braun, on the other hand, chose to surrender to the US. He didn’t have a Mia helping him. He got his people out of Germany all on his own (with a little help from Dornberger), and he did it in the craziest way.

Before the Saturn rockets used in the Apollo missions, von Braun developed the Redstone, the first large American ballistic missile, which served as the basis for a whole series of rockets. A modified Redstone launched the first US satellite, and the Mercury-Redstone rocket sent the first Americans into space. He did a lot to popularize the concept of space travel. Check out his crazy concept for the “ferry rocket” from the pages of Collier’s magazine in 1952.[3] Von Braun died of pancreatic cancer in 1977.

Walter Dornberger spent two years in a British prison camp after escaping Germany. The British didn’t like him at all. They thought he was a weasel. That didn’t stop the US from hiring him in 1947. He worked on a bunch of things, including the ultracool X-20 Dyna-Soar spaceplane. It was never made, but the concept was as awesome as the name. I’ll let you google that one.

In Act III, Mia recruits Sergei Korolev in Germany and brings him back to Russia, along with thousands of German specialists. This was called Operation Osoaviakhim. It pretty much went as I describe it, sans Mia. The Soviets didn’t mess around. You want scientists? We’ll “recruit” thousands of them at gunpoint, all at the same time, and drag them and their families back to Moscow. The memo Mia reads to her mother is an actual translation of what these people were given.

Korolev is fun to read about. He had it rough, though. Arrested for treason and sabotage, tried and sent to a gulag where he lost all his teeth to scurvy. Saved at the last minute, retried and forced to work in a prison for scientists. When he got out, he ended up as chief designer of long-range missiles at the OKB-1 special design bureau. Korolev, the chief designer, was more or less the face of the Russian missile and space program, but the Soviet Union was a mess under Stalin. There were so many people working on so many different things, it’s really hard to keep up. I found a great read on the Soviet space program in the NASA archives.[4] If you have any interest in rocket research and all the politics involved, you have to read it. It’s fascinating.

Mia introduces herself as Nina, the interpreter, when she meets Korolev in Germany. Korolev was a married man. He had a daughter, Natalya. His marriage eventually fell apart, in part because of an affair with a young English interpreter from the Podlipki office. Her name was Nina Ivanovna Kotenkova. The two tied the knot in 1949.

Korolev’s crowning achievement as chief designer had to be the R-7, Mia’s perfect rocket. It launched both Sputnik and Yuri Gagarin. You can read the issue of Life magazine dedicated to the little satellite that created the space race at Google Books.[5] As Mia predicts, the R-7 was more or less useless as a ballistic missile, and it was only briefly deployed operationally. It was, however, the perfect space launch vehicle, and versions of the R-7 served as the basis for the Soyuz family of launchers, which is still in service, more than sixty years after the R-7 first tested. As of now, it has launched over eighteen hundred times.

Some name dropping. Tons of people were involved in the development of every rocket, including the R-7. The original cluster or packet design came from Mikhail Tikhonravov. He could write, of course, and wrote some very influential papers about rocket technology. His design was improved upon by a fellow named Dmitry Okhotsimsky at the Steklov Institute of Applied Mathematics. He came up with the cluster concept Korolev chose for the R-7. Korolev’s right hand, Vasily Mishin, also played a major part in the R-7 project. Unfortunately, Mishin will mostly be remembered for failing to put a man on the moon after he inherited the Soviet N1 program.

At the beginning of Act IV, a self-loathing Mia goes to Kapustin Yar to help with test launches for the R-2 and save some dogs. (I know you want to hear about the dogs, but we’ll do that later.) Kapustin Yar was created in 1946 for testing jet-propelled weapons starting with captured German V-2s. Nuclear tests were also performed on-site in the late fifties. Understandably, Kapustin Yar was kept secret and didn’t appear on any maps. Secret remote location, secret military projects, shitty black-and-white photography. You know where I’m going with this. The site is an all-you-can-eat buffet for conspiracy theorists and is often referred to as the Russian Roswell. Secret underground base. UFO sightings. Alien autopsy, of course. Little green men. There’s a “documentary” episode of History’s UFO Files called “Russian Roswell,” which you can find online, or you can read a summary[6] and get the gist of things. There’s all sorts of crazy in there (dogfight between an alien ship and fighter planes!), and a lot of it connects to this book, somehow.

There’s mention of a giant fireball falling from the sky in 1908 near the town of Tunguska. That part is true. It was the largest impact event on Earth in recorded history. Whatever it was, it flattened two thousand square kilometers of forest. Comet, asteroid, who knows? Of course, if you like conspiracies, you can believe just about anything hit Earth, including little green men in a giant spaceship. As the story goes, a team of scientists was sent to investigate some forty years later by none other than Sergei Korolev. Soon after, the Russian space program made miraculous progress because of some reverse-engineering of the alien spacecraft.

They even talk about Ahmad Ibn Fadlan, the tenth-century Muslim traveler who is said to have “witnessed ‘aerial battles’ between ‘shapes’ that moved through the clouds.” That is the dude the Sixty-Five is traveling with in AD 921 during the fourth entr’acte.

The other launchpad I mention in this book is Baikonur, a.k.a. “Gagarinskiy Start” (Gagarin’s pad). Both Sputnik 1 and Vostok 1, the first human spaceflight, launched from Baikonur on top of an R-7 rocket. In 1955, during construction, one of the workers fell off the launch platform and impaled himself on a steel rod midway down. Unfortunately for him, he didn’t have the Kibsu’s superstrength, and he died before they could take him down.

Happy now? If your priorities are the same as Mia’s, you want to find out what happened to the dogs. Everyone’s heard about Laika, the first animal to orbit Earth aboard Sputnik 2, but there were lots of dogs before and after. Laika got the short stick. She’s the only dog that was sent with no hope of survival. She died soon after liftoff, but she’d have died anyway because, well, you shouldn’t put a dog inside a satellite. Sputnik 2 reentered Earth’s atmosphere on April 14, 1958, and burned up before it hit the ground. That means that for about six months, there was a dead dog flying over our heads.

The ones Mia tries to save are Dezik and Tsygan. They were the first. Back then, they didn’t used pressurized cabins, so the dogs had to wear tiny dog space suits. In July 1951, they were shot up 110 km into the sky on top of a modified R-1 and… came back down safely. (Yay!) Dezik made another flight a week later with a dog named Lisa. Unfortunately for Dezik, the parachute didn’t deploy that time. In the book, Mia brought Tsygan home, but in real life it was Soviet physicist Anatoli Blagonravov who adopted the dog.

Between 1951 and 1960, at least twenty dogs made suborbital flights on top of a rocket. Here are my three stars:

Smelaya. She ran away (I wonder why) the day before her launch. They found her, though, and she flew with another dog. Both of them survived.

Bobik. He ran away. They didn’t catch him. Go Bobik!

Zib. Zib was a street dog they found running around the barracks. He made a successful flight. ZIB is a Russian acronym for “Substitute for Missing Bobik.”

There’s a website about Soviet space dogs with more info (and more dogs) and tons of pictures.[7] There’s even one of Korolev with one of the dogs. I strongly suggest the story of Damka and Krasavka. It would make a great movie.

The Wikipedia entry[8] has pictures of Belka and Strelka in a museum (I’m not sure if they’re stuffed or fake, but they are creepy). These two were the real superstars in Russia. They spent a day in orbit with a gray rabbit, forty-two mice, two rats, and some flies (no partridge nor pear tree) and came back alive. That made them better propaganda tools than dead Laika, and soon they were featured in children’s books and cartoons and on just about anything from stamps to candy tins and cigarette packs. Then comes the true story of the Cold War romance that prevented World War III. Okay, not quite, but still. Back at the space center, there was a male dog named Pushok. He had never made it to space, but he was not the kind of dog that gave up, or ran away. He had grit, determination. It was those qualities that Strelka recognized, and the two quickly became proud parents of six puppies. Among the litter was little Pushinka (Fluffy), whom Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev gave to John F. Kennedy’s daughter, Caroline. Pushinka could not resist the childish ways of Charlie, one of the Kennedy dogs, and their forbidden love resulted in the birth of Butterfly, Streaker, White Tips, and Blackie, whom Kennedy affectionately called “pupniks.”

Slight change of tone. Much of Act V revolves around Lavrentiy Beria. There were a lot of really bad people in positions of power around the time of the Second World War. Hitler, of course. Stalin was a nasty piece of work. And then there’s Lavrentiy Beria. If you make a list of evil people who walked the earth at one point or another, I suggest you leave some room near the top for this guy. He got his start crushing a nationalist uprising in Georgia, got about ten thousand people executed in the process. He met Stalin in 1926 and was a close ally during his rise to power. As chief of the secret police, he supervised the barrier troops, the folks who shot their own soldiers running away from battle. He expanded the gulag labor camps, continued the great purge started by his predecessor. After the war, he helped organize the communist revolutions in several European countries—he liked those as bloody as possible—and he oversaw the development of the atomic bomb for the Soviets. By some accounts, he liked to participate in the butchery himself. He is said to have personally tortured the family of an Abkhaz Communist leader, placing a snake inside his widow’s cell and having her watch as he beat her daughter to death.

So this is a man directly responsible for hundreds of thousands of deaths, and what does he do in his spare time? He prowls the streets of Moscow in his limousine and brings young women back to his home, where he rapes them inside his soundproof office. They found a bunch of bones in his backyard, so he apparently didn’t stop there. Those who left his home alive were handed a bouquet of flowers, because in his mind nothing says consent like taking flowers from the secret police. People knew about it. Even members of the Politburo warned their daughters to stay away from that asshole.

I read about a woman who was breastfeeding and refused to let Beria touch her. When the secret police mistakenly handed her a bouquet anyway, he apparently said, “Now it’s not a bouquet, it’s a wreath! May it rot on your grave!” He had the woman arrested the next day. He took a Russian actress to his home and promised her he’d set her father and grandmother free in exchange for sexual favors. He then told her: “Scream or not, it doesn’t matter. You are in my power now. So think about that and behave accordingly.” She, too, was arrested, and sent to the gulag. Her father and grandmother had died weeks before Beria offered to free them. We know most of this from the mouth of Colonel Rafael Semenovich Sarkisov, one of Beria’s most senior bodyguards. During the war, Beria had Sarkisov keep a record of all the women he took back to his house. Sarkisov was supposed to burn it all at some point, but he kept a copy, which he handed to the new head of the MGB when Beria’s fall from grace began. I really wanted to let the Kibsu have a go at Beria, but I settled for the bullet in the head he got in real life. For a deeper look into the mind of Stalin and his profoundly messed-up entourage, try Simon Sebag Montefiore’s book.[9]

Beria apparently bragged about killing Stalin. There has been a lot of speculation about Stalin’s death, and many believe he was poisoned, presumably with warfarin. It was reported that Stalin was drinking diluted Georgian wine on the night he fell into a coma.

Perhaps ironically, it was Beria who requested a new trial for Sergei Korolev after he was sentenced to life in the gulag. Beria had just been named head of the NKVD. He saved Korolev’s life to sell himself as a fair and humane leader. It did not last, but Korolev survived because of Beria’s actions.

The former is a transliteration of his Chinese name, family name first; the latter is the Americanized version he used while in the US. Qian was one of the people behind the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a real genius. While in the US, he was temporarily made a colonel so he could go to Germany and debrief Wernher von Braun and others after they surrendered to the Americans. The government later accused him of being a communist during the Red Scare. After spending five years under house arrest, he was finally allowed to return to China, presumably in exchange for some prisoners from the Korean War. The US got rid of an absolutely brilliant man because they were paranoid about communism.

In China, things were dicey at first for Qian. Mao wasn’t the most trusting guy. Qian came from the US, and his father-in-law worked for the government the communists had just overthrown. He had to profess loyalty to the party a bunch of times, but things got better for him soon enough. In 1956, he became director of the Fifth Academy of the Ministry of National Defense, where he ran the missile and nuclear development program. He reached his goal in record time, and China tested its first nuclear bomb in 1964. Qian also founded the Chinese space program, so you may hear from him again at some point. Qian never returned to the United States (he was pissed). He died in 2009, at the age of ninety-seven. His work on complex systems was groundbreaking and served as the basis for some of China’s social engineering experiments.

There’s been so much written on the subject, lots of movies even, that I chose to focus on smaller, lesser-known events. It’s also why the book ends in 1961, before Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. Some of the events I mention were huge when they occurred—the Vanguard rocket explosion, for example. It happened live on national television, at a time when the US was deeply troubled by the Soviet space endeavor. Google “Vanguard explosion” and you can watch it blow up; there are tons of videos online.

When they go back to the US, Mia works at the Jet Propulsion Labs as a human computer. You probably recognized the term from Hidden Figures.[10] Little was known about these insanely smart women and the role they played in the space program before Margot Lee Shetterly’s book and the movie that followed. Both were huge successes and went a long way in giving these pioneers some of the credit they deserved, even if it came fifty years too late. Hidden Figures follows a group of black women working as human computers in a segregated section of NASA’s research center at Langley beginning in 1961, right after this book ends. There were, of course, some women working in scientific positions in the early days of rocket science, before the era of spaceflight. Nathalia Holt’s book[11] (also nonfiction) follows a handful of women leaving their mark on the other side of the country at JPL during more or less the same timeline as this book.

Mia thinks that, once at JPL, she might work on the Ranger program. Those were unmanned missions, basically trying to hit the moon after taking close-up pictures of the surface and transmitting them to Earth. The first six Ranger missions all failed, leading to a congressional investigation of both NASA and JPL.

At the end, Sarah dies when she causes a Titan missile to fall on her and the Tracker at Vandenberg Air Force Base. That happened, though it was an accident. It must have felt like the world was coming to an end for the people who were there. The blast doors were a mere twelve hundred feet from the explosion, and it was quite the explosion. It destroyed the two-hundred-ton silo doors. Debris flew all the way to the Vandenberg golf course, a few miles away. Miraculously, there were no casualties.[12]

One of the most interesting (and depressing) things one learns reading about climate change is how long we’ve known about it. There are people today who aren’t sure how big a role humans played in the process, but there are also plenty who simply don’t believe that the temperature is rising, or that greenhouse gases have anything to do with it. Svante Arrhenius wrote about it in 1896 (you can read his paper online[13] if you’re curious), and he wasn’t the first. We’ve known this stuff for over a hundred years.

I really enjoyed reading about ice core research. I just love the simplicity of it. I have no idea who thought about air bubbles trapped in ice first, but I like to think the conversation involved an ice cube tray and sounded a bit like the one between Mia and her mother. The hydrogen and oxygen isotope thing is a bit more complicated, but still very cool. The credit for that belongs to Willi Dansgaard,[14] the Dutch paleontologist Sarah worked with. I drop a few more names throughout the book; feel free to look them up.

Towards the end, Sarah thinks she’s found a way to measure the amount of CO₂ in the atmosphere that comes from burning fossil fuel. I didn’t let her explain, because I thought it was too technical, but now we’re here and I’m filled with regret, so let’s science together a bit. We’ll start with carbon—that’s the C in CO₂. Carbon is awesome. It can make funky things at the temperatures found on Earth, like the sugar found in DNA. That’s why it’s in every living thing we’re aware of. It’s in the air. It’s everywhere. There’s also a special kind of radioactive carbon called carbon 14 but we’ll call it Steve because that’s more fun. Steve is also in the atmosphere. Plants take in some Steve during photosynthesis. That means a banana tree has some Steve in it, and so does a banana. You eat the banana and, you guessed it, there is some Steve in you. (Note that the same is true if something else eats the banana and you eat the something else.) In the end, you and every other living thing has more or less the same amount of Steve in you as there is in the air around you. Then you die. Sorry. When you die, you stop eating bananas. No new Steve comes in, and the Steve that’s already in you starts to fall apart because, you see, Steve is not like the other carbons. Steve is unstable. He decays, sloooowly. If you leave Steve alone in a room and come back in 5,730 years, half of Steve will be gone. Because we know how fast Steve decays, we can know how long you’ve been dead by measuring how much Steve is left in you. That’s carbon dating in a nutshell. What’s that got to do with fossil fuel, you say? Well, fossil fuel, petroleum for example, is still a bit of a mystery, but we know it comes from decomposed organic matter. Dead things. Very, very dead. We also know that the process takes, like, forever, way longer than it takes for Steve to disappear completely. So when you burn fossil fuel, the CO₂ you throw back into the air contains no Steve at all, and over time, you reduce the Steve concentration in the atmosphere. Tadaa. That effect was discovered by Dr. Suess (that’s not funny) in the late fifties. Dr. Hans Suess was an American chemist born in Austria.

Given the current attitudes towards facts and science, trying to imagine the social consequences of rising temperatures and extreme and unpredictable weather is really scary. One only has to look at the past for clues. In the first entr’acte, set in 1608, the Eighty-Seven stumble upon a witch trial on their way back from visiting the first wind-powered sawmill in the Netherlands. The sawmill is real, of course, and that technology would help create the Dutch empire, but the interesting part is the witch trial. Like other parts of this book, it has something to do with the climate. The event takes place at the height of what is known as the Little Ice Age. It’s a period of—you guessed it—cooler temperatures. Winters in Europe and America were colder. Rivers froze. The Baltic Sea froze. Winters also lasted longer, by a few weeks, which meant shorter growing seasons, crop failures, famine, etc., etc. Bad things. Science was kind of iffy at the time, so in the absence of a plausible explanation, people looked to the supernatural for answers. Witches. Unmarried women made for easy scapegoats and were singled out for the slightest of reasons, like having a mole. Women were accused of anything from stealing the milk out of starving cows to raising storms with the Devil’s magic. In North America, the Salem trials (1692–93) are the most well known, but there were similar trials all over Europe during that period. This wasn’t the first time people were killed because of the weather. The Greek myth of Iphigenia, sacrificed by her father to quell the gods’ anger and receive favorable winds, is rooted in the customs of the time. In the north, the Vikings performed a “blót” to ensure Odin’s goodwill about the weather. Scientific ignorance paired with religious extremism leads to all kinds of craziness, including throwing people into rivers to see if they float. There is some interesting new research[15] that suggests that the Little Ice Age might have been caused in part by reforestation after the genocide of native people in the Americas. Following Christopher Columbus’s first voyage, Europeans killed about 90 percent of the indigenous population, either directly or by spreading disease. The dead stopped farming, and trees started to grow back, reducing CO₂ concentrations enough to cause a global cooling.

Alas. Let’s start with the obvious. As far as I know, they don’t exist, but I’m the first to admit that there’s a whole lot I don’t know. If you believe this story, though, they would have come a little over three thousand years ago, most likely somewhere in Mesopotamia. On today’s map, that’s Iraq and Kuwait, parts of Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Turkey. I know this, of course, because I recognized Kibsu and Rādi Kibsi as words from the Akkadian language, which was spoken in the region at the time. I say they would most likely have landed in Mesopotamia, because Akkadian was also the language used for trade in much of the Near East, so, who knows?

According to the online Akkadian dictionary[16] of the Association Assyrophile de France, the word Kibsu can be interpreted in several ways: a footprint, a path, a way of life, a line of reasoning, etc. Rādi Kibsi is the one following the footprints, a tracker.

Mia, Sarah, and her mother leave Germany on September 18, 1932, aboard the SS Milwaukee of the Hamburg-Amerika Linie. They cover their tracks as best they can, but if you look at the actual passenger manifest from that day, you will find a Sarah Freed.[17]

In AD 921, a thousand years earlier, the Sixty-Five is part of a delegation sent by the Abbasid caliph to Volga Bulgaria. She travels up the Volga River with a fellow named Ahmad Ibn Fadlan—we talked about him before—who serves as secretary to the ambassador. I tried to set events happening at different times in similar places, and you’ll see the Volga in a few places throughout the book. For example, Kapustin Yar, where they built the launchpad for the first Soviet missile, the R-1, is near the river.

Ahmad Ibn Fadlan was a real person. He went up the Volga to meet the new king of Volga Bulgaria, and along the way he met himself some Vikings. The cool part is he took some notes. I put a little quote from his journal in the scene, but a lot of it is inspired by what he wrote. The Kibsu ends up marrying Igor of Kiev, son of Oleg of Novgorod. The Varangians, a.k.a. Vikings, ruled over a massive part of Europe and Asia at the time. The Kievan Rus’ empire, as it was called, was based in Kiev, and we have Igor’s dad to thank for that. Olga of Kiev, Igor’s wife, was also a real person, and she was not someone you wanted to mess with. We don’t know much about her, but the story about burying people alive, killing thousands, and burning a town with pigeons to avenge her husband is a real thing.

We go back another eighteen hundred years to meet the Seven in the third entr’acte. She—her name is Varkida—joins a group of horse-riding warriors before being banished and starting her own all-woman tribe, which you might have recognized as the legendary Amazons. Varkida is the name of an Amazon (BAPKIΔA) appearing on a sixth-century red-figure amphora (it means “princess,” likely from Proto-Indo-European *wel-, as in English “weal[th]”).[18] Legend aside, there is significant evidence that the Amazons were actually Scythian warriors (sometimes called Saka). The Scythians were badass. They were nomadic tribespeople, incredible horse riders, and absolutely deadly with a bow. And yes, some of them were women. Just google “Scythians”; the connection to the Amazons is cool enough that thousands of people have written about it.

How we go from actual Scythian warriors to Greek myth is even better. Maybe I’m biased because I trained as a linguist, but I think it’s objectively cool. OK, so the Greeks travel and they meet a bunch of people they don’t know. They find out the names of these people and they go back home and tell everyone. A good chunk of what we can read about the Amazons comes from Greek historians. Now, the Greeks back then have some problems, but a small ego isn’t one of them. They think their language is awesome. So, some Greek fellow gets back to Greece and says he met some women warriors and they were called the Amazons. There are many possible etymologies for the word. The one I picked is reconstructed from Old Persian: hama-zan, which would mean “all women.” Another option is from Iranian ha-mazan. It could mean something as simple as “warrior.” There are many that make sense. But one Greek historian, Hellanikos, doesn’t speak Old Persian. It’s all Greek to him. He sees the Greek a-(ἀ-) “without” and mazos (μαζός) “breast.” BOOM! Without breast. That’s how we end up with women who cut their breasts out because, contrary to the millions of women who have used bows throughout history, these ones can’t do it without hurting themselves.

The same goes for the Arimaspi (that’s what the caravan members called the first tribe Varkida meets). In Early Iranian, the word would probably be a combination of ariama (“love”) and aspa (“horses”), and it would sort of make sense for people to refer to a horse-riding tribe this way. But Herodotus, another Greek historian, thinks it’s from the roots for “one” and “eye,” and all of a sudden we have a whole tribe of one-eyed people spreading terror up north. In both cases, we have completely absurd myths started not because anyone actually saw anything, but because the guy doing the linguistic analysis was an idiot.

That was my “linguistics is cool” moment. Oh, and the final battle takes place on the banks of the Volga River.

Three generations later, in 825 BC, the Ten settles in the kingdom of Quwê. The Kibsu is still great at breeding horses, of course, and the Ten sells some to the king of Israel. Those of you who studied the Bible would recognize the kingdom from the first book of Kings as the place King Solomon got his horses from: “Solomon’s horses were imported from Egypt and from Kue—the royal merchants purchased them from Kue at the current price. They imported a chariot from Egypt for six hundred shekels of silver, and a horse for a hundred and fifty. They also exported them to all the kings of the Hittites and of the Arameans” (1 Kings 10:28–29).

The Kibsu loses all the knowledge in Quwê when the Ten kills herself. The Eleven, and all of those who follow, will spend their lives trying to get it back.

There are a million more historical references in the book, some more subtle than others. I’ll let you discover them for yourself.

I really hope you enjoyed this one. I can tell you I had an absolute blast writing it.