Red Equinox

Chapter Twenty

It was one of the most amazing buildings that Ryan Cawdor had ever seen.

Over the years he'd watched a number of scratched old vids, and some of them had been set in big churches and huge, stately edifices, the like of which no longer existed in the Deathlands. The anti-American memorial was that kind of building. Though it did show some evidence of the sky-blackening nuking the ville had suffered, it was still in incredibly good shape.

The entrance hall soared several stories high, with a vaulted roof, one corner patched and marred with a tangle of metal scaffolding. Several of the windows on the northern flank had been destroyed, but some of the others remained intact. Panes of colored glass were bound about with lead strips. Despite the dull weather outside, the stained glass glowed with the richness of the hues — azures and scarlets, deep cobalts and pale greens.

The pictures were what Ryan recognized as being religious subjects, though he'd always believed that the Russians had been a godless people. Here were old men with snowy beards and circles of golden light around their heads, little babies in white robes, tiny silver wings sprouting from between their shoulders.

The sound of the villagers' shuffling feet echoed through the hollow mausoleum, like the faint clapping of an immeasurably distant host. Once they were inside, the pressure from the sec forces eased. The maroon uniforms were replaced by a dull green, worn by a number of elderly men and women who seemed to function as both ushers and guides. They shepherded the throng along the winding corridor, following the route marked out by a sequence of black arrows.

Overhead was a booming, crackling voice, so distorted by the echo that it was barely possible to make out any words. Ryan looked inquiringly at Rick, who shrugged his shoulders. He put his head to one side and tried to concentrate, listening to the message repeating itself several times before he moved in close to Ryan and whispered in his ear.

"Yeah. It just welcomes us to the Memorial Exhibition, tells us to keep to the left and keep moving, not block corridors, where toilets are and... all that kind of stuff."

Krysty had been listening to Rick. "Where are they?" she asked.

"What?"

"The toilets, you stupe!"

"Oh. I think he said they were on this level, at the bottom of the main flight of stairs up into the first exhibition hall. Yeah. Look, there they are. See the signs?"

That was something that hadn't changed at all since before the long grayness.

Ryan and Rick waited together in the main hall while Krysty picked her way between the lines of people, vanishing into the doorway marked with a childlike drawing of a female figure.

"What kind of stuff's going to be in here?" Rick asked.

It was Ryan's turn to shrug. "Who knows? I guess there would have been a kind of American... what's the word I want?"

"Embassy?"

"Yeah. That's it. There'd have been one of them in the ville. Russkies could've raided things from there."

Rick nodded. "Guess so. Mebbe some propaganda movies and posters as well. It seems to me as if this place is almost like a shrine. There's sort of a religious feel to it."

"Like a church, you mean?"

"Yeah. But instead of being dedicated to love and humanity, this looks like it's probably devoted to keeping the flame of hatred still burning bright and hot."

They were talking quietly, trying to keep out of people's way. But one of the old men came up to them and said something sharply, pointing to the flight of stairs and the first of the arrows.

Rick nodded and pointed to the sign for the ladies' rest room, grinning at the usher and making a, "Women! What can you do about them?" sort of gesture with his hands. The Russian's face cracked into an understanding smile and he walked away, leaving them alone.

At the top of the stairs Ryan could just make out some huge black-and-white portraits, at least thirty feet high. They'd been daubed with great smears of bright vermilion paint, looking like fresh blood.

"Who're they? I recognize that one in the middle. Kennedy, isn't it?"

The freezie peered up. "My eyes aren't so good today, Ryan. Yeah, that's Jack. And there's Teddy, Harry, Dwight, Richard and... and all of 'em."

"Who's that fat, ugly one at the end? With the kind of scar on his cheek?"

"You're kidding me, Ryan."

"No. So much red paint I can't recognize it at all."

Rick shook his head. "Him of all men! So soon you forget! After the nineties and all the political in-fighting... You know who suddenly came popping out of the closet like the old wooden nickel, don't you?"

Ryan looked again at the seamed face, the hanging jowls and the hunted, darting eyes. "You don't mean that!.."

"Yeah, who else?"

"But I thought there was some kind of..."

"Scandal?" The freezie grinned like a hungry wolf.

"Sure. Didn't he?.."

One of the elderly men in green uniforms was wandering toward them again and Ryan closed his mouth, pretending a sudden interest in the vaulted stucco of the high ceiling.

Krysty chose that moment to reappear, flashing a smile at him. "Hi, lover," she whispered. "Ready to go check out the show?" Arm in arm they moved slowly up the massive staircase, Rick panting at their heels, hanging on to the wide brass balustrade.

The arrows led them along the corridors, a part of the silent, shuffling throng of patient Russians. When they reached an exhibit, Rick would pause and gather his breath, translating what the captions and slogans said in a low voice.

It was a confusing blur of fact and fantasy. Ryan's own knowledge of the years immediately preceding sky-dark was limited to some old vids and a few crumbling tabloids that he'd seen among the ruins. Krysty was a little better informed, but Rick had lived it all and he was able to distinguish for them what was true and what was not.

Much of the exhibit was in the form of posters, some of them running all the way from floor to ceiling. And there were whole rooms covered in painted slogans. Rick read them silently, occasionally reciting some part to the other two.

Once he shook his head and sighed. "Something's happening here, but I don't know what it is, do you?"

In the center of the building was a huge atrium, with patched and broken skylights, and balconies ringing it at every level. Here they had a chance to snatch a breath and relax a moment. Most of the locals around them took the opportunity to smoke roll-ups, plucking them from pockets in their ragged furs and cupping them in their hands, like children breaking school rules.

"It's amazing," Rick said, glancing around to make sure nobody was close enough to overhear their conversation.

"Yeah. Figure we should be out and looking for the tools we want."

"Patience is the greatest of all virtues, Ryan, my friend. This is a once in a lifetime chance for me." He paused, continuing ruefully, "And you gotta remember I don't have all that much lifetime left."

"Is it just a way of keeping the old fires of hatred glowing?" Krysty asked. Ryan noticed that her sentient hair had curled in, tight and defensive, against her nape.

Rick sniffed. His face was pallid and there were dark rings around his eyes. "Yeah. The way they tell it, it was us that started the nuking. Sneak attack, like Pearl Harbor. Posters say that the whole of the North American continent was vaporized and sank without a trace, no survivors, hundred percent chill. Zero. Zilch. All gone."

"But if their barons claim that everyone got chilled, why bother with all this shit?" Ryan waved his hand around the echoing hall. "What's the point of it, Rick?"

"The Party says remember. Says to remember is never to make the same mistakes again."

"What mistakes?" Krysty asked.

"Posters say that they tried for friendship in the eighties and into the nineties."

"True?" Ryan asked.

"Sure. Called glasnost. But peace is a two-way street. We went along it, then the guys running the store on Mockba Boulevard began to get cold feet. Folks in equivalent positions in the Pentagon got to feeling the same way. All downhill from there. Wrongs on both sides. Men with the guns had the loudest voices. I marched and demonstrated and all that stuff. It didn't make a hoot or a holler of difference. Cold got colder. Shutters fell and frontiers closed. Hell, you guys know the story. I guess we could open a place like this in the ruins of Washington and tell the same twisted truths and torn lies."

It was one of the longest speeches they'd ever heard Richard Neal Ginsberg make.

Ryan noticed that a slender woman in a green uniform was looking at them, head on one side, as if something about them rang some kind of bell for her. It was enough.

"Let's go," he said quietly, hand dropping automatically to the butt of the SIG-Sauer blaster.

They trailed on into the depths of the vast, rambling building.

Outside, Zimyanin had left his wag and walked briskly through the watery spring sunshine, up the stairs to the entrance of the museum. He showed his sec pass to the woman on the doors and explained his mission to her. She switched on her lapel voice-trans and passed the message about the three outlanders the sec force was to look for.

"One-eyed man, red-haired woman, one other male. Orders from..." Zimyanin interrupted her, and she altered what she'd been about to say. "Do not apprehend. Notify main sec control at front entrance."

"How many other exits, Comrade Sister?" he asked her.

She pointed them out to him on a faded map, beneath a worn sheet of clear plastic. Zimyanin looked carefully at it and nodded, snapping out orders to have all the exits covered.

"It will take several minutes, Comrade Major-Commissar," she replied.

"Quick as you can. I do not think a few seconds one way or the other will make very much difference."

Which was one of the rare mistakes made by the stocky, pockmarked sec man.

About a hundred yards away, Ryan and the other two were staring disbelievingly at some glass cases in one of the halls.

Rick glanced around them, but nobody seemed very interested. Dust lay thick on the shelves, smudging the outlines of what was on them.

"Tools," Rick breathed. "Hell's bloody bells! Everything we could need."

"What's the notice say?" Krysty asked.

"Just that these were found in the imperialist's dacha in the country, and that they were used for purposes of espionage."

"Espionage?"

"Spying, Ryan. But they're mat-trans tools, just what we need to fix the doors. That movable wrench and those there, and that and that."

"Wouldn't like them all, would you?" Ryan whispered sarcastically.

"No. Just those five I pointed at."

"Attracting some attention, friends," Krysty whispered. "And I'm getting a bad feeling. Better move on. We could come back and lift this after dark. No sec locks anywhere."

"Who'd want to steal this old junk?" Rick asked, eyes wide with delight. "Just us."

They were near the end of the unguided tour, and they could actually taste fresh air after the humidity and stink of sweat and damp clothes. There seemed to be just one more room to visit. It had a large notice at its entrance, and they had become aware of a new liveliness among the Russians, all wearing smiles of anticipation.

"What's it say, Rick?" Ryan asked.

"Don't know."

"Guess?"

"It's something about a place where feelings can be shown, and patriotic anger demonstrated for the Party."

"Oh, Gaia!" Krysty breathed, first in line into the vast room, which displayed only a single glass case at its center.

The sides of the glass were slick with a torrent of human spittle, almost obscuring what rested inside the case — a tattered Stars and Stripes.