" 'They,' comrade chairman?" The colonel looked puzzled.

"Whoever." The chairman's vague wave takes in half the horizon of the richly paneled Kremlin office. "What a joke. Whoever they were, at least they saved us from a pasting in Cuba because of that louse Nikita." He pauses for a moment, then toys with the wine glass that sits, half-empty, before him. The colonel has a glass too, but his is full of grape juice, out of consideration for his past difficulties. "The 'whoever' I speak of are of course the brother socialists from the stars who brought us here." He grins humorlessly, face creasing like the muzzle of a shark that smells blood in the water.

"Brother socialists." The colonel smiles hesitantly, wondering if it's a joke, and if so, whether he's allowed to share it. He's still unsure why he's being interviewed by the premier — in his private office, at that. "Do we know anything of them, sir? That is, am I supposed to—"

"Never mind." Aleksey sniffs, dismissing the colonel's worries. "Yes, you're cleared to know everything on this topic. The trouble is there is nothing to know, and this troubles me, Yuri Alexeyevich. We infer purpose, the engine of a greater history at work — but the dialectic is silent on this matter. I have consulted the experts, asked them to read the chicken entrails, but none of them can do anything other than parrot pre-event dogma: 'any species advanced enough to do to us what happened that day must of course have evolved true Communism, comrade premier! Look what they did for us! (That was Shchlovskii, by the way.) And yes, I look and I see six cities that nobody can live in, spaceships that refuse to stick to the sky, and a landscape that Sakharov and that bunch of double-domes are at a loss to explain. There are fucking miracles and wonders and portents in the sky, like a galaxy we were supposed to be part of that is now a million years too old and shows extensive signs of construction. There's no room for miracles and wonders in our rational world, and it's giving the comrade general secretary, Yuri, the comrade general secretary, stomach ulcers; did you know that?"