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Now, let's see, Kronov thought (generations of surveillance had bred out any Soviet citizen's capacity for talking to themselves aloud when alone). A nice out-of-the-way place, with a lot of Ukrainians. He thought about the treatment his nationalistic countrymen would be getting in Riga, and shrugged. Even Latvians would do, I suppose. In the end, he decided on Estonians, whom he didn't like any better than Lithuanians or Latvians.
The place was a large Estonian colony on a harsh little moon called Haven. Kronov snorted; they'd named their area "Talli
Well, let's see how they like having a few thousand Russian patriots for neighbors, Kronov thought with grim satisfaction as he began the paperwork.
Kirichenko's instructions regarding the dispersal ratios could go, along with Kirichenko, straight to hell. If confronted, Kronov would claim that he'd taken those instructions no more seriously than Kirichenko's obvious jest of taking the rest of the day off. Or that, had Kirichenko been serious about the holiday, he'd obviously intended Kronov to process the work in the most expedient way possible and then go home.
With any luck, Kirichenko himself. will be censured for sloppiness, Kronov considered, then indulged himself in the pleasant fantasy of processing Kirichenko's unpla
It was midnight before he'd finished, but he was tired only with the fatigue of a man finishing a job well done.
Kronov turned off the lights in his office, putting on his coat as he closed the door and headed for the elevator.
Kronov thought about the Russian Nationalists-his Nationalists-arriving in the Talli
There can be no other outcome. We Russians are, by definition, rulers of other, lesser peoples.
The elevator had arrived, and he took it down to the street. The weather had cleared, and Kronov looked up at the brilliantly starlit sky.
Too bad it couldn't have been Ukrainians, he reflected.
But Estonians would have to do. It changed nothing. Russians were Russians, Balts were Balts, and that was that.
HANG TOGETHER
HARRY TURTLEDOVE
Anton P?ts awoke in darkness. He had gone to bed in darkness, with neither Byers' Star nor Cat's Eye in the sky. He would go to bed in darkness again, for this stretch of truenight lasted more than forty hours.
His heart thudded in his chest as he rose. The Talli
His wife and daughters and son-in-law still lay snoring in the big communal bed, huddled together for warmth. He let them sleep. He pulled on his boots and a wool cap, then rubbed his hands, the gnarled hands of a man who had fought the land for years with only hand tools as weapons. The heat the rubbing yielded was faint and fleeting. He cherished it anyhow.
A guttering tallow dip gave just enough blood-colored light to let him make his way to the door without tripping over the shoes that lay everywhere. He went outside. The wind nipped at his cheeks above the border of his bushy brown beard, now heavily streaked with gray. Even the patterns the stars scrawled across the sky were meaningless to him. No one had ever bothered naming Haven's constellations, and without names they had no power. The stars were lost to him and his anyway, lost forever.
In front of his wood cabin stood a pole, cut from as tall and straight a te
Not that Talli
His gaze traveled over the low rooftops toward another pole, even taller than his. In the darkness he could not really see it, could not see the ba
His upwelling bitterness threatened to overflow. God knew the CoDominium cared little for what happened to politically unreliable deportees once it dumped them on Haven. Still, it had taken either more than the usual run of bureaucratic indifference or diabolical cu
Breath smoking around him, P?ts clumped back to the barn to milk the cows and sheep. The animals grunted in sleepy surprise and complaint as he threw open the door. They had not evolved to spend forty-odd continuous hours in darkness, and did not care for it one bit. Two cows kicked him as he milked them, both just above his knee. He was swearing and limping as he walked down to the river to check the vegetable plot.
Weeding by starlight was something he hadn't anticipated when BuReloc dumped him here (there were a lot of things he hadn't anticipated when BuReloc dumped him here). He had to do it, though. Turnips and onions, like cattle and sheep, hadn't evolved to spend so long a time in the dark. They went dormant. The local plants kept right on growing. If he wanted to keep his vegetables unsmothered till Byers' Star rose again, his trowel had to stay busy.
The knees of his trousers were thickly padded, to keep his own knees warm as he crawled along on the frigid ground. After a while, the cold seeped through the padding. P?ts keep weeding all the same.
After a couple of hours, he heard footsteps coming along the path. He glanced up, expecting his son-in-law. But it was not Konstantin. The broad-shouldered silhouette limned by starlight and the wan illumination of Cat's Eye's lesser moons wore a bulging fur cap with earflaps. That meant it was a Russian; like P?ts, Estonian men generally favored wool headgear.
Letting the gloom hide his scowl, P?ts said, "Good day," in Russian. He spoke it fluently enough, as did most of his compatriots. Only a handful of Russians in Talli
This Russian paused now, peered toward him in the gloom. "Who-? Oh, it's you, P?ts," he grunted-in his own tongue, of course. "Maybe you think it's a good day, but then you're already at your plot. You cursed Estonians took all the land close by the town when you got here. Me, I have another hour's walk before I can even begin my work."
"We didn't know more people were going to be settled here, Iosef Trofimovich," P?ts said, as patiently as he could. He addressed the Russian by first name and patronymic, more politeness than Iosef Mladenov had granted him.
Mladenov grunted again. "We are as many as you. These plots should be shared out more fairly. One day, they will be shared out more fairly, whether you like it or not-and the fields as well, where again your holdings keep ours at arm's length from our own homes."