Godlike Machines Read Online Free PDF Page A

the internet, Dimitri?”
    “Just barely.” It’s something from my childhood, like foreign tourists and contrails in the sky.
    “It was a tool the authorities couldn’t control. That made them nervous. They couldn’t censor it, or take it down-not then. But they could take down the people behind it, like Gennadi. So that’s what they did.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “It’s all in the past now. We had our time together; that’s all that matters. Perhaps if I hadn’t made such a noise about my findings, perhaps if I hadn’t angered the wrong people ...” Nesha stops speaking. All of a sudden I feel shamefully intrusive. What right have I have to barge in on this old woman, to force her to think about the way things used to be? But I can’t leave, not having come this far. “His clothes,” she says absent-mindedly. “I don’t know why I kept them all this time, but perhaps you can use them.”
    I put down the tea. “Are you certain?”
    “It’s what Gennadi would have wanted. Always very practically-minded, Gennadi. Go into the room behind you, the cupboard on the left. Take what you can use.”
    “Thank you.”
    Even though I’m beginning to warm up, it’s good to change out of the sodden old clothes. Gennadi must have been shorter than me, his trousers not quite reaching my ankles, but I’m in no mood to complain. I find a vest, a shirt and an old gray sweater that’s been repaired a number of times. I find lace-up shoes that I can wear with two layers of socks. I wash my hands and face in the bedroom basin, straightening back my hair, but there’s nothing I can do to tidy or trim my beard. I had plans to change my appearance so far as I was able, but all of a sudden I know how futile they’d be. They’ll find me again, even if it takes a little longer. They’d only have to take one look in my eyes to know who I am.
    “Do they fit?” Nesha asks, when I return to the main room.
    “Like a glove. You’ve been very kind. I can’t ever repay this.”
    “Start by telling me why you’re here. Then—although I can’t say I’m sorry for a little company—you can be on your way, before you get both of us into trouble.”
    I return to the same seat I used before. It’s snowing again, softly. In the distance the dark threads of railway lines stretch between two anonymous buildings. I remember what the snowplow driver said. In this weather, I can forget about buses. No one’s getting in or out of Zvezdniy Gorodok unless they have party clearance and a waiting Zil.
    “I came to tell you that you were right,” I say. “After all these years.”
    “About the Matryoshka?”
    “Yes.”
    “I’ve known I was right for nearly thirty years. I didn’t need you to come and tell me.”
    “Doesn’t it help to know that someone else believes you now?”
    “Truth is truth, no matter who else believes it.”
    “You constructed a hypothesis to fit the data,” I said. “It was a sound hypothesis, in that it was testable. But that’s all it ever was. You never got to see it tested.”
    She regards me with steely-eyed intensity, the earlier Nesha Petrova burning through the mask of the older one. “I did. The second apparition.”
    “Where they proved you wrong?”
    “So they said.”
    “They were wrong. I know. But they used it to crush you, to mock you, to bury you. But we went inside. We penetrated Shell 3. After that-everything was different.”
    “Does it matter now?”
    “I think it does.” Now is the moment. The thing I’ve come all this way to give Nesha, the thing that’s been in my pajama pocket, now in the trousers. I take it out, the prize folded in a white handkerchief.
    I pass the bundle across the coffee table. “This is for you.”
    Nesha takes it warily. She unwraps the handkerchief and blinks at the little metal box it had contained. She picks it up gently, holds it before her eyes and pinches her fingers around the little handle that sticks out from one side.
    “Turn