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knew as well in that moment that this would be no mere three-week freebie vacation. Knew that there were temptations here that could change his life forever.
    Knew somehow that it had been changed already.

 
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    Turning to the business news, in Munich today, Red Star announced the purchase of 35 percent of the Löwenbrau brewery empire. “This will not only give the Soviet consumer ready access to good German beer, thereby diminishing our nikulturni reliance on rotgut vodka, it will give us a ready market for surplus grain and establish a major hops industry in the Ukraine,” declared Valery Zhores, Red Star’s Chairman.
    “And we’re not paying for it in valuta, either,” he added. “The deal is being financed by furnishing Löwenbrau with grain at 50 percent of world prices over the next ten-year period.”
    Score another Hero of Socialist Entrepreneurship Medal for the Big Red Machine!
    —
Vremya
     
    LONDON INVADED BY THE RED MENACE!
    They’re young, they’ve got money to burn, and they seem bent on turning London tits for asses! As our granddads used to say of the Yanks, they’re overpaid, oversexed, and over here! Of course we’re talking about the self-proclaimed Red Menace, the charmingly horny Eurorussians who have made the club scene here part of their weekend circuit.
    They’re the barkeeper’s delight and the bouncer’s bane, they’ve all got AIDS vaccination certificates, and they’re giving it away at a rate that’s got half the hookers in Soho on the dole. From me according to my ability, to you according to your need, that’s the party line these days, and the Comrades have dutifully become Stakhanovite party animals!
    Check out the scene at Ivan the Terrible’s or The Electric Samovar and see some red-hot glasnost in action!
    —
Time Out
     
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    II
     
    Thank God or Marx or Gorbachev or whomever passed for the patron saint of the children of the Russian Spring for this vacation, Sonya Gagarin thought as the TGV sped her across the unheeded French countryside at 300 kph, away from Brussels and Red Star and her boring job and Pankov the Human Octopus, toward Paris and two weeks of freedom.
    There were times—such as this last week at the office, slaving away at editing particularly boring AI translations of stock prospectuses and stat sheets into humanly comprehensible French and English and fending off Pankov’s moist and pathetic advances—when it seemed to Sonya that she had spent her whole life with her nose to the grindstone waiting for the fun she had so richly earned to finally begin.
    On the other hand, there were also times, such as every Friday at 1730, when the office closed and the weekend began, such as right now, sitting in a high-speed train approaching Paris and washing the taste of the workaday world out of her mouth with a passable Côtes-du-Rhône, when she knew full well how lucky she was, or more fairly, how well the scenario she had worked out for her life had played thus far.
    Brussels might be
Belgium
and Red Star might not be the foreign service and her job might not be much more than that of a glorified secretary, but she was young, and she was Russian, and she was actually living in
Europe
, and how many people could say at the age of twenty-four that they had achieved their girlhood dream?
    Not that it had been exactly handed to her as a birthright! Not that she hadn’t earned it by her own diligent efforts!
    Sonya Ivanovna Gagarin was no relation to the famous first cosmonaut—though as a Pioneer and a young Komsomol member she certainly did nothing to disillusion peers, teachers, and youth leaders who might think she was.
    Glasnost or not, perestroika or not, family connections and prestige still counted for as much in the New Russia as they did in the Decadent West, or anywhere else on Earth if truth be told, and a daughter of a trolleybus driver and a cashier at the GUM growing up in a two-room flat on the tenth floor of a grim housing block