Rasputin's Bastards (47 page)

— one of them was he. He moved with a hunter’s ease. The other, a small man with slicked back hair, followed nervously. “These fuckin’ zombies give me the creeps,” he whispered. And the big man, Darya’s hero, muttered something low. Darya spun closer to hear the end of the sentence.

“ — no waste,” he said. “We die soon.”

Darya didn’t care about dying soon. She wanted to follow him. Ignoring the call of the song, she elbowed her way through their fast-closing wake.

He was a hero — one who would not succumb. That was why she’d picked him. She had a sense of these things.

“There you fuckin’ go, ‘we die soon.’ We’re not goin’ to die soon. This is some fuckin’ kind of dance.”

“Not we.
We
.”

“What the fuck?”

The two were heading back toward the store that she’d managed all these years. They were moving quickly — quicker than Darya herself could. She stumbled through the crowd of strangers here in New Pokrovskoye — the people who had come heeding the call. There were so many of them — people who had come like invaders — eating their food and drinking their tea and sleeping in their homes.

The man and his friend were gone and she stood amid a forest of strangers. They moved and swayed rhythmically under the sky — and in spite of herself, she found that she was doing the same. It was a tempting thing to do — to fall back into the magnificent dream that they’d concocted for themselves, an amplification of the game that had played itself out in her dreams when she was just a little girl. She remembered those dreams fondly — sitting at Babushka’s feet in the school house, the old woman beaming down at them and beginning: “Have I told you the story of the two stallions, my Children?” and then beginning with a whistling of wind, and transporting them all to such a wonderful place — a place like the Empire.

Babushka died too soon, she thought, and let a hint of sadness creep into her.

But she quickly disciplined herself. Babushka had died. Her stories ought to be finished.

Grimly, Darya set off for the store.

The only narrative that she would inhabit would be the one that she had made for herself today. The one with the man from Russia.

She moved more quickly once she made it past Harbour Street. There were only pockets of people here — heads upturned, swaying back and forth. She elbowed between a thin balding man and a woman with flowing mascara who seemed to be in her sixties. Her shop was in sight.

She fished in her skirts for the key, and rushed up to the door to turn the lock. Her man had made it to the store — she was sure of it. The first place they’d met. In New Pokrovskoye. There was no Empire here and it was summer and —

She opened the lock and stepped inside.

“Hello, my child.”

She frowned. The voice was coming from everywhere.

“Who is it?”

“You should have to ask. Tell me — why are you not dancing?”

“What?”

“Why are you not dancing?”

She froze, and whispered:

“Koldun?”

The Koldun stepped out from behind a rack of liquor. He was carrying something in his hand.

“Everyone dances,” he said. “That is why we went to such trouble — to create a world for you, one you might all share. A world of treasure and gold and magic.”

“P-programming,” said Darya. Her hands scurried across the counter behind her — seeking some kind of a weapon. “There’s no world.”

The Koldun shrugged. “All right,” he said. “Programming then. And you, little Darya, have managed to figure a way around the programming.”

He looked at her more closely. “But you’re not that clever.”

He sniffed the air. “Kilodovich,” he said. “Alexei Kilodovich has touched you.”

Darya backed away. The Koldun moved closer.

“What a thing he is, this thing our Babushka has found. The power to free a girl. Hah. Where is he now? He cannot be far.”

“I — I don’t know who Alexei Kilodovich is,” said Darya — although she thought she might know who the Koldun was talking about. She felt a sliver of fear through her — and suddenly, she wanted nothing more than to return to the Empire — to the beautiful dream her beloved Babushka had crafted in her, with stories and the museum and a lifetime of programming.

The Koldun smiled sadly and shook his head. He raised the thing in his hand — Darya’s eyes widened as she recognized it for what it was.

“You can never go back, my little puppet,” he said softly, aiming the machine pistol at her middle. “Babushka would know everything then.”

There was a great oppressive darkness all around him and everywhere. Alexei Kilodovich screamed into it.

He screamed a lot of things. He screamed his rage at Babushka — at Holden Gibson — at Vladimir. He struggled too — trying to move and tear a hole for himself in this dark place where he’d fallen There was nothing to tear, though. For a long time — days or weeks or hours or minutes — Alexei grasped at unyielding dark — at absence. Then, for a time, he could hear things: music — laughter — dance.

Dance.

Was this the thing that Orlovsky, the Koldun had promised? A dance in the village?

After everything he’d learned, Alexei wasn’t sure he wanted to go near this dance. No. He was sure, in fact, that he didn’t want to go there.

Not, at any rate, to fulfill Babushka’s plans for him.

If he were to be trapped in a void — well so be it.

So Alexei settled back. And as he did, he detected substance in the firmament beneath him — cold rock. There was a faint glow too — a pinkish glow that surrounded him, filled his vision.

Or not precisely his vision. Alexei did a thing with his eyelids, and suddenly he saw —

Rising sun.

Pink over distant mountain peaks.

Alexei blinked, and stared up at the vanishing starscape. The distant peaks.

“More memory,” he spat.

Just what he needed. Alexei got up and started walking.

If any man on the Romanian crew ever sang, or had conversations, or just coughed and belched, that man saved it for times when Stephen was not around. The bridge of their submarine was quiet as a monastery.

That was fine with Stephen. He found, as the submarine dove deeper and further, that he was happiest free of the burden of conversation. His bunkmate Uzimeri was becoming more snide and contemptuous of him by the hour. Chenko and Pitovovich had launched into a full-bore campaign to get Mrs. Kontos-Wu to open up and really
talk
about the traumas Fyodor Kolyokov and City 512 had inflicted on her. Conversations with the three of them offered up all the subtle pleasures of a Scientology breakfast seminar. As for Zhanna? Happily, she was busy sleeping most of the time. And when they were awake, they avoided one another — both, no doubt, horrified at the potential for wrenching embarrassment that even a chance encounter in the submarine’s narrow spinal corridor held for them.

The Romanian “monks” were better. There were always eight of them who manned the bridge. They looked at one another rarely, spending their energy hunched over banks of coloured lights and switches and valves labelled in Cyrillic. They moved the controls with a kind of rhythm that suggested either knowledge or instinct. At some point, Stephen reflected as he came in to watch the morning shift, the two become the same.

A chart was laid out on a light table in the middle of the bridge, just to the fore of the periscope. No one stopped Stephen from looking at it, or the grease pencil marks on the surface of the plexiglass cover that held it in place.

Stephen munched on a stub of bread that would do as his breakfast, as he checked on their progress. From the looks of things, they had somehow made it past the southern tip of the British Isles overnight, and were heading now in a straight southwesterly direction. He took a ruler and set it against the line. The first significant land mass that it would intercept was Cuba. It could also hit southern Florida, or Haiti, or any of the smaller Islands surrounding it with just a small change in course.

But Stephen would put money on Cuba.

It seemed like an obvious place for it to be, whatever it was. Stephen could well imagine that the KGB or the Politburo or whoever it was that gave the okay for City 512 and Kolyokov’s dream-walking work would have connections with Castro’s bunch in the Caribbean. Still Soviet — but distant from the main apparatus.

Stephen imagined a huge plantation, covered in sugarcane wafting in the tropical breeze, with a bunch of old men and women — the mysterious Mystics — sipping cooling tea and reading each other’s auras to the songs of the cicadas; only occasionally descending into their brightly-painted sensory deprivation tanks to commune with the Universe.

It made a hell of a lot more sense than what Zhanna had said: “We have to go deep to find the Mystics.”

Perhaps when she said deep, she meant, deep into enemy territory. Deep into Cuba. Not deep underwater. Stephen leaned against a bulkhead. They were deep enough underwater as matters stood. The deck had maintained a notable, discomfiting pitch to forward for far too long during the night — and although he’d been paying attention, Stephen did not once detect a comforting, compensating pitch to the aft. Occasionally, he’d hear the sound of groaning metal — the sound of the ocean crushing in on them. It was not a comforting noise. Not at all.

Stephen wasn’t alone in his feelings. As quiet as the Romanians were, they were clearly more and more uneasy the deeper they went. This morning for instance. They still moved through their paces like robots. But every so often, Stephen would see a sign: a nervous tic under the eye of the navigator; or the radar operator run his fingers through his oily hair, and look up with just a flash of terror in his eyes. When he came in this morning, Stephen was sure he heard sobbing, echoing through the submarine’s narrow bridge.

Stephen gulped down the rest of his coffee and set the nearly empty cup down on the map table. The waves in brown liquid near the base vibrated in tidy little concentric waves. He put the last of the bread in his mouth and gnawed at the crust. The coffee at the bottom of his cup, he noticed, was pooling to forward.

They were diving again.

“Aren’t you supposed to sound a horn or something when you dive?” said Stephen. The bridge crew didn’t look up. The hull metal groaned. The engines thudded.

“
Help us
,” whispered a voice at Stephen’s back.

Stephen turned fast enough to set the cup tumbling. It splashed coffee over 2the top of the map board, pooling and beading on the grease pencil delineation of their course — running in thick streams toward the American coastline at the fore end of the map table. He grabbed the cup and, seeing no towels about, daubed up the coffee with his sleeve. It still smeared the grease pencil, but not to the point of illegibility. Some did make it underneath the plexiglass, and it spread underneath to make new contours on the sea bottom off Key West.

By the time Stephen looked back, whoever it was that had asked for his help was long gone.

Help us
.

Stephen hurried to aft through the spinal corridor — ostensibly to take his coffee mug back to the galley and wash up — but really, because the whole
Help us
thing had creeped him out. The voice had sounded plaintive — beaten. It made it sound like the best way you could help was to find a brick or a rock, and bring it down on the whole miserable bunch of them.

Stephen stopped in the galley. Chenko was sipping coffee there; Uzimeri was fooling around with something at the stove. Boiling water spilled over the forward edge of his pot and made a devilish hissing sound on the element.

Chenko spotted Stephen and smiled at him.

“We are diving again,” he said amiably. “How deep do you believe we can go, before the sea crushes us?”

“Hopefully,” said Stephen, “a little deeper than this.”

“Trust in Zhanna,” said Uzimeri from the kitchen.

Chenko rolled his eyes.

“Refill your cup,” he said.

“Later.” Stephen sat down at the galley table. “So what do you think Petroska Station is?”

“Back to that, are we?” Chenko laughed. It was a little game they’d started at dinner the night before — before Mrs. Kontos-Wu had showed up, and the conversation had defaulted back to group therapy mode.

What on earth could Petroska Station be?

“Okay — here is one. It’s a weather station in the Antarctic. Tunnels run deep into the mantle — miles deep — and intersect with the massive tombs of an ancient civilization. The Mystics are using pyramid power derived from complicated crystalline structures that rested there untapped for cold millennia, to commune with the Universe.”

“Blasphemy!” shouted Uzimeri and made a face. Stephen laughed in spite of himself.

“What do you think, then, Konstantine?” said Chenko.

“A blessed place where all prayers are answered and Paradise is laid out for all to see.” Uzimeri gave a quick curt nod.

“That’s what you said last night.”

“Well that is what I think.” Uzimeri looked at Stephen. “It might have been revealed to me in a Vision, for all that you would know — hey boy?”

“Leave him be,” said Chenko. “Look to your water — it’s making a terrible mess in here.”

Uzimeri shook his head and turned back to the stove.

“So what do you think?” said Chenko, turning to Stephen. “Any clues?”

For an instant, Stephen debated telling Chenko about the strange voice he’d heard, begging him for help; the discomfort he’d seen in the Romanians who crewed this boat; and the dreams of great flowering squid, that kept a pace with the submarine as it sank deeper into the Atlantic murk.