Asimov's Science Fiction: July 2013 (9 page)

Back out in the warm June night Miroslav limped toward his mother's apartment, cursing his failures and his fate. He cursed his leg with every step, his arm every time it swung through a graceless arc. He cursed the army, he cursed his commanders, he cursed the cane he leaned upon. Two streets away from the restaurant he noticed his cheeks were wet with tears, and he cursed his weakness and his rebellious eyes.

His mother's apartment building looked like all the others: square and grey and bleak in the half moonlight. Miroslav levered himself down to sit on the steps. The breeze might have been refreshing had it not carried traces of refuse and old vomit. Somewhere in the night, cats screeched at one another.

Miroslav had sat on these same steps with Anastasiya, over a decade ago, on many nights much fresher than this one. He had held her hand—the thought of her hand in his brought new curses to his mind for the Chechens, for the makers of artif icial limbs, and for the stupidly bold lieutenant who cost him his arm and leg. Miroslav did not want to believe that anyone who had come through the same training that he had would ever be as foolish and unheedful as—

Miroslav sat up straighter. He put his day together with his memory and wondered if Lieutenant Rostropovich had been rejuvenated from a previous off icer. It might explain the young man's arrogance, his air of righteous entitlement... and
what Miroslav had thought was simple stupidity might actually be much more dangerous: complete loss of fear. If one is made new, made whole, would that drive out fear?

If I let them do this to me, Miroslav wondered, is that what I will become? Will I still be Slava Ponomarenko?

Despite that misgiving, and despite his disbelief, sitting on the steps in the moonlight Miroslav understood the allure of renewed youth with wholesome, unhindered limbs.

Administrator Berezovsky smiled his wolf ish smile. Miroslav decided he did not like the man very much.

"So, Captain Ponomarenko, have you chosen a cadet?"

The administrator's voice drove spikes of pain into Miroslav's head, but he was well-practiced in the art of hiding what the vodka had done to him the night before. He shook his head, despite the pain. "No, Mr. Berezovsky. I am afraid I do not yet understand enough about this... Teryosha program."

Berezovsky dropped his smile; his countenance hardened, though he tried to keep his voice light. "What is there to understand? You have been chosen for a great privilege. And, what is more, you have been given clear direction. I do not need to ask if you are still a good
soldier,
still a man who knows how to follow orders. When you choose, we will proceed."

Miroslav bristled at the affront to his honor as an off icer. If that was how Berezovsky wanted to play this—

"As you say, I am still under orders. However, my orders give me until the twentieth, which is two days away.

"Let us say, then, that I am unprepared to make a selection because I have been briefed only on the objective. I have not seen any intelligence, nor been given any tactical program to follow. I would be a poor soldier indeed if I marched blindly off a cliff because I did not ask my
superior
for a look at his map."

Berezovsky's eyes seemed to crystallize, and his jaw worked as if he was going to say something. He turned to the wall and regarded the Waterloo painting, and presently said, "What is it you wish?"

"I would like to see the apparatus," Miroslav said. "I would like to become acquainted with it."

"Afraid this might be a ruse?" asked Berezovsky. "An experiment, with you as the rat?"

Miroslav shook his head. "No, merely an elaborate, bad joke at my expense."

Berezovsky led Miroslav into the east wing of the building, one of the legs of the the building formed around the courtyard that opened onto the academy's parade f ield. Midway down the corridor, they entered the inf irmary. Miroslav recognized the nurse; she was weathered and worn, and had looked much the same way twelve years ago. He wondered if she had been treating students at the school since it was built. She smiled at him.

"Nurse Godina, Captain Ponomarenko needs something for his headache," Berezovsky said, with a quick look at Miroslav. "Also, he is interested in your version of the tale of Teryosha."

"Of course," the nurse said. She opened a glass-fronted cabinet behind her and extracted a bottle of aspirin. She handed two pills to Miroslav and said, "Come with me, please, Captain."

She led him into the small ward, which smelled of antiseptic and was equipped with two beds and a variety of white-enameled cabinets. Nothing seemed extraordinary;
Miroslav associated everything he saw with standard hospital equipment. Berezovsky sat on one of the crisp white beds, and Nurse Godina grimaced. She pulled a key ring from her pocket, jangling the keys as she found the right one.

"I believe this is what you mean, Captain," she said, and opened the biggest cabinet.

Miroslav was almost disappointed at the items inside: an array of chemical titration equipment, some bottles with bar-coded labels, and a few small electronics. He had envisioned something out of an old mad scientist film, not a hospital room nicer than the last one he had stayed in.

He was growing more convinced that this was not real, but rather than a joke he began to suspect it was a test of some sort. What Berezovsky had said, about an experiment that needed a rat, might not be too far off the mark.

Perhaps his best approach was to play along.

"Which one of you performs the procedure?"

Berezovsky said, "Nurse Godina handles all the preliminaries and monitors progress while I conduct the... transfer."

"Are you the only ones?"

"Very few know about the program, because of the... sensitive nature of the work. And the transfer takes a deft touch."

Miroslav limped to the cabinet and looked more closely at the items. He saw the nurse stiffen, so he did not try to touch anything. "This looks like a voltmeter, these two things look like GLONASS receivers, and... this seems an awful lot of glassware for a very few bottles of chemicals."

"I'm disappointed, Captain," Berezovsky said. "Surely you remember what is on the second f loor, above this room?"

Miroslav looked out the window, at the courtyard, and tried to place himself mentally in the room above. After a moment he nodded. "The chemistry classroom and laboratory."

"Yes, we get the additional chemicals from there, when needed."

"If you'll excuse me, Captain," Nurse Godina said, and closed and locked the cabinet.

"I don't understand. What are the chemicals for?"

Berezovsky did not answer. His face registered frustration at Miroslav's questions, as if he knew Miroslav was stalling. In the silence, Nurse Godina said, "Your body is a chemical factory, Captain, and your brain is a complex electro-chemical reactor. The Teryosha process uses chemicals to produce the optimum environment for—"

"Enough," said Berezovsky. "You asked to see the apparatus, and you have now seen it. I do not think seeing it has helped you, but I will ask: are you ready to select one of the cadets? Do you need to see them again?"

"What happens to the child?" Miroslav asked.

"They go to sleep," Berezovsky said, and gestured to Miroslav and the nurse by opening his arms. "And you wake up."

"I wake up... is it really me who wakes up?"

"Of course it's you. Your memories, your knowledge, your experience, all intact, but a new body."

Miroslav reached across his chest and touched his left arm where the stump met his prosthesis. "What happens to this one?" He had a sudden fearful vision of being a cadet, young and excited at the prospect of graduating ahead of his classmates, waking up inside a mutilated body such as his. He shivered.

"In your case, buried with full military honors. The autopsy will conf irm an aneurysm—diff icult to detect, unfortunate." Berezovsky smiled, a chilling grin. "If you like, you can attend your own funeral."

That seemed too much. Miroslav paced, trailing his fingers along the bedrail and then feeling the thin curtain, which slid in its overhead track. Its chain jingled. Miroslav's head felt as if it were encased in a block of clear plastic; he struggled to think, to come up with relevant questions. "How long does it take?"

"A few hours, with a day, maybe two, to recover and get used to your new body. By the third day you will be running races around the track. After another day to learn about the boy you have become, who unfortunately had to be hospitalized for a sudden illness, you spend a week or two with the boy's family celebrating his—your—early graduation and, in your case, acceptance into special Army training." Berezovsky paused, smiled, and continued, "Think of it as a few days of furlough, some extra leave time, at a camp for actors."

"When did this start? Who pays for it?"

"Captain, I hardly see how a history lesson will help you make your choice."

Always the subject came back around to Miroslav's choice, and now he saw a way to get at the root of the matter, to expose the fraud. "But it has been going on for some time? Off icers and dignitaries have been choosing cadets for many years, further back than when I went here?"

"Yes," said Berezovsky.

"Then, why wasn't I chosen?"

Creases appeared in Berezovsky's brow. "Do you mean, why was Sharova chosen instead of you?"

"Yes."

Berezovsky chuckled. "What do you recall about Sharova? How did you compare to him?"

Miroslav pictured his classmate: a bear of a boy, strong and supremely conf ident. "He was big," Miroslav said, "a great player at everything, but especially wrestling."

"What else? Was he smart, friendly, handsome?"

"Handsome, perhaps... not especially friendly. Impatient with many of us."

"Impatient because you were weaker?"

"Perhaps," Miroslav said.

"Then place yourself in the position of the Party official about to be rejuvenated. Would you choose the stronger, or the weaker?"

Miroslav did not answer, and Berezovsky continued, "You were always good, and sometimes the best—but the point was that you, Slava, were always
good."
Miroslav alerted at the administrator's sudden familiarity, but did not interrupt. "Sharova could be a bully at times, but not you. You competed well, and when you came up second you didn't take it out on everyone else like Sharova did—even when he won. No, Sharova was the better choice because you were the better man... though I may have said too much."

Miroslav agreed; Berezovsky had said too much. Miroslav's head spun, not from the vodka but from a sudden recognition that shot into his mind the possibility that this insane proposition might be real after all. Reluctant to confirm his suspicions but curious to see if he was correct, Miroslav forced himself to form carefully selected words. "You speak as if you were there," he said.

Berezovsky glanced at Nurse Godina and smiled his wolfen smile. "I was, Ponomarenko. But back then you called me Colonel Arsov."

Miroslav reported to the school on the twentieth of June, soaked by his walk in the rain and ragged from lack of sleep.

"You look terrible, Ponomarenko," said Berezovsky. Miroslav tried not to think of the administrator as his old commandant, Arsov.

"I was up late," Miroslav admitted. "My mother is ill."

"Is that all?"

It was not all. She was ill, but Miroslav did not want to confess the dreams he had endured during his small stretches of sleep. He dreamed he was Sharova, who went to sleep and woke up as someone else. He dreamed he was himself, who slept and woke up as Sharova. He was Pasha, dying, looking up at a stranger's face while the stranger claimed to be Miroslav. He was the wooden boy Teryosha, watching his own mother weep at his funeral.

"It is enough," Miroslav said.

Berezovsky raised his eyebrows, but did not press for more details.

"We have alerted Cadet Ortoff, and he will meet us in the inf irmary in half an hour. Do you have any questions before we go?"

Miroslav did not exactly remember who Cadet Ortoff was. He had blurted out the name two days ago to keep Berezovsky from pestering him. The selection seemed to please the administrator, but it did not matter to Miroslav. For the first time in his life—when his career should be over and he was being offered a chance at a new start—he found himself following orders for their own sake alone, and he was not proud of it.

"I do have a question, sir," he said. "In my last unit I had a young lieutenant named Rostropovich who was a graduate of this sub-academy. Was he an... early graduate? Was he a Teryosha?"

Berezovsky smiled and nodded. "Yes, in fact. He left the school seven years ago. You must not reveal the truth, of course, but it would not hurt you to know that in his previous military career he had been Major Artemi Voleikov. An adequate off icer, but an exemplary politician. Very well connected."

Miroslav wished he himself were not so well connected. "How many... Teryoshas are there?"

"I'm afraid the exact number is
very
highly classified."

"Is this the only..." Miloslav had trouble thinking of the right word.

"Source?"

"Yes, I suppose. I mean, do other academies participate?"

Berezovsky shook his head. "This is the only one, and access is tightly controlled. Even my secretary does not know the nature of this program.

"Is it not unusual enough, Captain, for a very few, very young men to show such extraordinary potential that they bypass much of the routine preparation for positions of great responsibility? So long as we produce only one, sometimes two, Teryoshas a year, and they are posted far apart from one another in different offices of the government, it
is
unusual but not alarming—and only adds to the sub-academy's prestige. But imagine if the program was to expand, and sudden savants ascended across the country? The upheaval... there would be no hope of secrecy after that."

Miroslav sensed a tiny opening. "Perhaps it would be better if I withdrew, then, to leave room for a better candidate."

Berezovsky frowned. "You would toss out your patronage with the rubbish? Unthinkable. Do you think you would prefer to be a wounded veteran instead of a whole and hearty soldier?"