{"id":519,"date":"2021-02-09T15:16:41","date_gmt":"2021-02-09T15:16:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=519"},"modified":"2021-02-19T11:16:31","modified_gmt":"2021-02-19T11:16:31","slug":"a-rocket-for-dimitrios-by-ray-nayler","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=519","title":{"rendered":"A Rocket for Dimitrios by Ray Nayler"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

A Rocket for Dimitrios<\/em><\/strong> by Ray Nayler (Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em>, November\/December 2021), is the second of his \u2018Sylvia Aldstatt\u2019 stories,1<\/sup> and takes place in an alternate world where America, after finding a crashed flying saucer in 1938, went on to develop superweapons that changed the course of WWII (and also allowed it to establish hegemony over the rest of the world: Russia was invaded after the war; Roosevelt is serving his seventh term as president).
The story starts with Aldstatt falling out of a \u201cterraplane\u201d and plummeting towards the surface before the story flashbacks to a point in time several days earlier. Here we see her at an American Embassy party in Istanbul, where the ambassador talks to her about the purpose of her visit:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cSo, you\u2019re the girl that talks to dead people,\u201d the ambassador had said as I came into his office that morning.
I noticed he had one of those idiotic gold Roosevelt silhouette pins in his lapel. A badge of loyalty. They weren\u2019t required, but I was beginning to see them crop up more and more among the sycophants of the diplomatic corps.
So, you\u2019re a puffed-up, aging boy whose daddy was smart enough to grab up the saucer patents early, I wanted to say. But I didn\u2019t. I wasn\u2019t feeling combative. I was feeling fragile and tired, struggling to fight off a cold caught on the transatlantic rocket flight.
[. . .]
\u201cSir, I\u2019m a combat veteran of the Second World War and the Afterwar. I was in General Hedy Lamarr\u2019s Technical Corps. I pilot the loops, if that\u2019s what you mean.\u201d
Maybe that would help him sort the word \u201cgirl\u201d out of his speech.
He didn\u2019t even blink.\u00a0 p. 16<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Before this meeting Aldstatt talks briefly to a Chief Inspector Refik Bayar, a well-connected Turkish secret policeman better known as \u201cThe Fisherman\u201d, who offers a briefing on Dimitrios Makropoulos, the dead man whose memories she is going to read. Makropoulos supposedly knows (or knew) the location of a second crashed saucer, and the Americans urgently want to find it before any other country does to avoid destabilising the world order.
When Aldstatt later goes to the building that houses Makropoulos\u2019s body and the loop machinery, she meets the Chief Inspector once more, and gets a briefing on the dead man\u2019s life as a professional middleman and criminal who operated in the shadows:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cThere is a drug smuggling ring in the mountains north of Thessaloniki run by a Greek named Dimitrios who is never caught. This is in 1937. Was it him? We believe so\u2014but we cannot be sure. We don\u2019t pick up his trail again with certainty until he is sighted by one of our agents at the Athene Palace hotel in Bucharest. There, we know it is him. Our Dimitrios. Now he\u2019s playing the role of a Greek freighter captain, but what he is really involved in is selling Black Sea naval intelligence to the Nazis via their emissaries in Rumania. This is 1940. We have our eyes on him until 1942, when our services are\u201d\u2014he paused, considering his words\u2014\u201ccompromised. We catch a glimpse, perhaps, of him again. The port town of Varna, in fascist Bulgaria. First mate of a salvage vessel. He approaches one of our double agents embedded with the Axis Bulgarian government with information he says will alter the course of the war. This is 1943. The course of the war, by then, is largely unalterable. It took you Americans a few years to crack any of the technology you found on that saucer that crashed in your Western desert, but by 1943, things were much more certain.\u201d
Ashes, ashes, you all fall down<\/em>, I thought. And Turkey wakes up from its semi-Fascist dreams and joins the winning team to make sure it gets a slot in the U.N. But what was Turkey up to before that?
\u201cAnd then?\u201d
\u201cAnd then our double agent in Bulgaria is compromised. And shot.\u201d
There was a long beat of silence, with only the seagulls screaming over the Golden Horn to fill it.  p. 22<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

When Aldstatt eventually dons the loop helmet, and enters the dead man\u2019s memories, she initially sees him trying to sell the location of the saucer to the Germans in the middle of WWII, before seeing his childhood as a goatherd in the Greek mountains, and then as he floats in the sea after his ship is torpedoed.
After the session she tells Alvin, her OSS handler, that Makropoulos spoke directly to her\u2014something unprecedented in any of the dead people she has read\u2014and that he appears to be aware of what has happened to him.
The rest of the story sees Sylvia reliving more of Makropoulos\u2019s memories (which eventually start deteriorate and become distorted by her presence) against a backdrop of external developments that, among other things, include an apparent schism at the top of the American government over the desirability of recovering the second saucer\u2014as revealed to Aldstatt by a night time visitor in a antigravity suit. This latter character (spoiler), Eleanor Roosevelt, reappears later on.
The conclusion of the story not only manages to satisfyingly tie up all the various plot strands but also, after revealing one of Makropoulos\u2019s formative experiences as a child, produces an unexpectedly touching ending.
This is a very impressive piece (probably one of the best I\u2019ve read recently in Asimov\u2019s<\/em>) and one that provides a huge amount of immersive detail. Nearly every paragraph throws off descriptions and information about the characters, their behaviour, their physical location, the geopolitics of this world, and the geopolitics of our<\/em> world. You end up with the impression that Nayler has taken all his experience as a Peace Corps volunteer, Foreign Service officer, and Cultural Affairs officer\u2014and his life time observations of the world and its inhabitants\u2014and squeezed them all into one story.
This should be on the Hugo finalist ballot, but it probably won\u2019t be.2<\/sup>
****+ (Very good to Excellent). 18,800 words.

1. The first published story of Ray Nayler\u2019s \u2018Sylvia Aldstatt\u2019 series is The Disintergration Loops<\/em> (Asimov\u2019s SF<\/em>, November\/December 2019). I suggest you read A Rocket for Dimitrios<\/em> first.

2. This probably won\u2019t be on the Hugo ballot because it appears in a print magazine and isn\u2019t available free online. And because it is also up against the Tor novellas, which are published as books (and book voters outnumber short fiction voters). Among other things.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A Rocket for Dimitrios by Ray Nayler (Asimov\u2019s SF, November\/December 2021), is the second of his \u2018Sylvia Aldstatt\u2019 stories,1 and takes place in an alternate world where America, after finding a crashed flying saucer in 1938, went on to develop superweapons that changed the course of WWII (and also allowed it to establish hegemony over […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[147],"tags":[50,149,4,29,148],"class_list":["post-519","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-ray-nayler","tag-50","tag-4-2","tag-asimovs-sf","tag-novella","tag-ray-nayler"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=519"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":615,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/519\/revisions\/615"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=519"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=519"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=519"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}