"To our land, to the future, to my specialty."

"Which was, precisely?"

"The placing of names on maps. I assume you know Imhof's paper, Die Anordnung der Namen in der Karte!"

"You read German?"

She nodded. "French and English too."

"My word!"

"I used my language skills on six years' duty in the DDR." Doing what? Ah, not for me to enquire.

Her shoulders were narrow. How much weight could they bear? Every so often she would hitch those shoulders carelessly with the air of an energetic filly frustrated, till now, at not being given free rein to dash forth-along a prescribed, exactly measured track. There lay the rub. Let her try to race into the ambiguous areas I had introduced!

I covered a yawn with my palm. "Yes, I know the Kraut's work. He gave me some good ideas. Oh, there are so many means for making a map hard to read. Nay, not merely misleading but incomprehensible!

Names play a vital role. Switch them all around, till only the contour lines are the same as before. Interlace them, so that new place names seem to emerge spontaneously. Set them all askew, so that the user needs to turn the map around constantly till his head is in a spin. Space the names out widely so that the map seems dotted with unrelated letters like some code or acrostic. Include too many names, so that the map chokes with surplus data."

Grusha stared at me, wide-eyed.

"And that," I said, "is only the icing on the cake."

Back in cartography I gave her a tour of the whole cake. In line with the policy of clarity I intended to be transparently clear.

"Meet Andrey!" I announced in the first studio. "Andrey is our expert with flexible curves and quills."

Red-headed, pock-marked Andrey glanced up from his glass drawing table, floodlit from below. Lead weights covered in baize held sheets of tracing paper in position. A trainee, Goldman, sat nearby carving quills for Audrey's later inspection. At Goldman's feet a basket was stuffed with an assortment of wing feathers from geese, turkeys, ducks, and crows.

"Goose quills are supplest and wear longest," I informed Grusha, though she probably knew. " Turkeys ' are stiffer. Duck and crow is for very fine work. The choice of a wrong quill easily exaggerates a pathway into a major road or shrinks a river into a stream. Observe how fluidly Andrey alters the contours of this lake on each new tracing."

Andrey smiled in a preoccupied way. "This new brand of tracing paper cockles nicely when you block in lakes of ink."

"Of course, being rag-based," I added, "it expands on damp days by, oh, a good two percent. A trivial distortion, but it all helps."

The second studio was the scale room, where Zorov and assistants worked with camera lucida and other tricks at warping the scales of maps.

"En route to a final map we enlarge and reduce quite a lot," I explained. "Reduction causes blurring. Enlargement exaggerates inaccuracies. This prism we're using today both distorts and enlarges. Now here," I went on, leading her to Frenzel's table, "we're reducing and enlarging successively by the similar-triangles method."

"I do recognize the technique," answered Grusha, a shade frostily.

"Ah, but we do something else with it. Here is a road. We shrink a ten-kilometre stretch to the size of one kilometre. We stretch the next one kilometre to the length of ten. Then we link strand after strand back together. So the final length is identical, but all the bends are in different places. See how Antipin over here is inking rivers red and railway tracks blue, contrary to expectation."

Antipin's trainee was filling little bottles of ink from a large bottle; the stuff dries up quickly.

Onward to the blue studio, the photographic room where Papyrin was shading sections of a map in light blue.

"Naturally, Grusha, light blue doesn't photograph, so on the final printed map these parts will be blank. The map, in this case, is correct yet cannot be reproduced-"

Onward to the dot and stipple studio… Remarkable what spurious patterns the human eye can read into a well-placed array of dots.

All of this, even so, was only really the icing…

Grusha flicked her shoulders again. "It's quite appalling, Colonel Valentin. Well, I suppose we must simply go back to the original maps and use those for the Atlas."

"What original maps?" I enquired. "Who knows any longer which are the originals? Who has known for years?"

"Surely they are on file!"

"All of our maps are in a constant state of revolutionary transformation, don't you see?"

"You're mocking."

"It wouldn't be very pure to keep those so-called originals from a time of exploitation and inequality, would it?" I allowed myself a fleeting smile. "Nowadays all of our maps are originals. A mere two percent change in each successive edition amounts to a substantial shift over the course of a few decades. Certain constants remain, to be sure. A lake is still a lake, but of what size and shape? A road still stretches from the top of a map to its bottom; yet by what route, and through what terrain? Security is important, Grusha. I suppose by the law of averages we might have returned to our original starting point in a few cases, though frankly I doubt it."

"Let us base our work on the first published Atlas, then! The least altered one."

"Ah, but Atlases are withdrawn and pulped. As to archive copies, have you never noticed that the published products are not dated? Intentionally so!"

"I must sit down and think."

"Please do, please do! I'm anxious that we co-operate. Only tell me how."

My studios hummed with cartographic activity.

Finding one's way to our gray stone edifice in Dzerzhinsky Square only posed a serious problem to anyone who paid exact heed to the city map; and which old city hand would be so naive? We all knew on the gut level how to interpret such maps, how to transpose districts around, and permutate street names, how to unkink what was kinked and enlarge what was dwarfed. We had developed a genius for interpretation possessed by no other nation, an instinct which must apply anywhere throughout the land. Thus long-distance truck drivers reached their destinations eventually. The army manoeuvred without getting seriously lost. New factories found reasonable sites, obtained their raw materials, and dispatched boots or shovels or whatever with tolerable efficiency.

No foreigner could match our capacity; and we joked that diplomats in our capital were restricted to line of sight or else were like Theseus in the labyrinth, relying on a long thread whereby to retrace their footsteps. No invader would ever broach our heartland. As to spies, they were here, yes; but where was here in relation to anywhere else?

Heading home of an evening from Dzerzhinsky Square was another matter however. For me, it was! I could take either of two entirely separate routes. One led to the flat where tubby old Olga, my wife of these last thirty years, awaited me. The other way led to my sleek mistress, Koshka.

Troubled by the events of the day, I took that second route. I hadn't gone far before I realized that my new assistant was following me. She slipped along the street from doorway to doorway.

Should I hide and accost her, demanding to know what the devil she thought she was doing? Ah no, not yet. Plainly she had her reasons-and other people's reasons too. I dismissed the speculation that she was another "eye of Mirov." Mirov had practically dissociated himself from Grusha. She had been set upon me by the new breed, the reformers, so-called. Evidently I spelled a special danger to them. How could they create a new country while I held the key to the old one in my keeping?

I had not intended a confrontation quite so soon; but she was provoking it. So let her find out! I hurried up this prospekt, down that boulevard, through the alley, over the square. Workers hurried by wearing stiff caps. Fat old ladies bustled with bundles. I ducked down a narrow street, through a lane, to another street. Did Grusha realize that her gait was springier? Perhaps not. She had not lost her youthful figure.