Rasputin's Bastards (67 page)

“Is the war — ”

“Over? Is the war over? That was your question, was it not? Well. No. A battle has happened and we are still here. But the war is not over. We are to meet. All of us. There is nowhere large enough on the submarine, so we go into Petroska Station.”

Stephen stretched. He was ferociously sore — the combination of sleeping on the decking and the beating he’d received, at the hands of — Zhanna. He pulled his arm away from her.

Zhanna merely nodded.

“I understand,” she said. “Will it help if I say I am sorry? That I was wrong — mistaken about you?”

Stephen rolled his shoulder — felt the joint crack.

Zhanna hurried beside him. “That is why I sent Kontos-Wu and the rest ahead. I wished to apologize to you. I — I told you I am no good at this.”

“When you can’t read somebody.”

Zhanna stopped for a moment and looked at her feet. She was wearing scuffed Soviet army boots. She kicked at the bulkhead with them.

“I am no good at this,” she said.

There came then another of those awkward silences between them. Stephen, who had been over the past few days subjected to belittlement, torture and open assault, now felt an odd guilt come over him — as though he were being insensitive.

He coughed.

“Why,” he said, “do we have to go to a meeting?”

“Much to discuss,” said Zhanna.

“Yes — but why not just use your dream-walking? Discourse?”

She smiled sadly, and picked up their pace.

“No more dream-walking,” she said. “No more Discourse. It is too dangerous by far. You were there for a little while. You saw how it was. Discourse could destroy us. Certainly it would destroy Vladimir, if we were to continue waging the war on that front.”

“Why would it destroy him?”

“Because of the way he’s made.”

Stephen shook his head. Vladimir — this baby with the brain of a forty-year-old — was a mystery to him.

“How,” he said slowly, “did someone young as you give birth to someone like Vladimir? A virgin birth.”

“Are you making fun?”

“I’m asking.”

“Well,” she said, “these things happen at City 512. It is an immense place, with many quiet men and women tending us. For the most part, we have controlled them. But not always. It is tiring work. You need to be asleep all the time.

“Sometimes — ”

“Yes?”

“Sometimes, they act on their own. And so it was a year ago — when I awoke, in a small operating theatre. One of the sleepers there — her name is Doctor Turov, and she is our obstetrician — was preparing an injection. She said to me: ‘You are to be blessed, Zhanna.’ And that is all I remember before waking up pregnant. The sleepers were very agitated — paying unseemly attention to me. It was then that we decided it was time to leave the place of our birth.”

“And give birth to Vladimir in a flat in Odessa.”

“By that time, things had changed,” said Zhanna. “I had come to understand my son. My brother.”

“And what exactly did you come to understand? Why Vladimir?”

Zhanna thought for a moment.

“
Why Vladimir,
” she said. “What a question.”

“I’m waiting,” said Stephen. “Why did you give birth to your brother?”

“There are theories. One is that we decided to create him ourselves. Or that he was made by God. Or the spirit of Rasputin himself.”

“Right. But those are theories. Why Vladimir?”

“Well,” said Zhanna, “Uzimeri is closest to the truth.”

Stephen frowned. “Vladimir’s a God?” Zhanna looked at him. “Jesus?” he said.

“Like that,” she said. “But he is not the son of God. Do you know how Vladimir works? I mean, how it is that he can think like an adult — talk to you — summon all this power?”

“I assumed that he was just a very evolved baby.”

“Very evolved. No. Vladimir does not have a brain much better developed than anyone other baby. He’s bright, and wilful — and will one day become very clever indeed. But he thinks, and acts, by occupying a portion of the minds of all the sleepers. He makes use of them — much as Babushka hopes to, in death.”

Stephen thought about that. “Like a big computer network,” he said.

“Yes,” said Zhanna. “A big computer network — without, however, a hard drive. A means to store and back up. It lives in the living minds of the sleepers — and dies with them too. You see — if we continued the war, across what is really the collective minds of the sleepers . . .”

“You’d risk destroying Vladimir too.”

“Right.”

“So why — ” Stephen paused to think — ”why then does Vladimir want to free the sleepers?”

Zhanna smirked. “It is a two-way street for Vladimir. And for all of us.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You figure it out,” she said. “I am tired of being the one to be puzzling things in this relationship.”

“Zhanna — ”

“Shh. Come. We have to meet with the others.”

In a vast chamber overlooking a deep pool, the crews of Petroska Station and the submarine mingled under the flickering reddish lights, on catwalks and staircases and at the greenish water’s edge. Zhanna stood with a crowd of pale, nervous children on a platform that was raised up on hydraulics. When she spoke, she stammered and her voice cracked.

“We are at war,” said Zhanna. “Babushka, the entity that many of you worship as a Goddess — is — is a Devil. She has come to this place, Petroska Station. She has driven out the Mystics who lived here. And she has tried to steal your minds. The way she is stealing the minds of the world.

“Last night, we fought her. She is — she is weak here because of the sea. When Babushka was . . . er . . . was awakened, dreamers did not do well in the sea. It ate them up. She only learned how to swim in it a short time ago. And she is old. So we could defeat her. But — not forever. She will be back. She controls the surface and she learns quickly.”

There was a murmuring now — particularly among the Morlocks who huddled, Stephen noticed, far from him and Mrs. Kontos-Wu.

“We have to leave here. Go up to the surface. Only there — ”

Shouting broke out at this point among the Romanians — clearly unimpressed with the plan. Zhanna stepped back from the guardrail, and Uzimeri stepped forward. He barked a few short syllables at them, then pointed at one or another of them with sharp, angry jabs of his finger.

The crowd quieted almost immediately, and Stephen thought:
Uzimeri must have been a mean fucker when these guys worked for him. Religion hasn’t softened those edges any.

“Only on the surface — in New Pokrovskoye — can we hope to defeat her. There, we can contact Vladimir. There, we can finish the war.”

Chenko stood forward then and shouted:

“You are mad. Babushka is the one we all serve.”

Tanya Pitovovich touched Chenko’s shoulder to pull him back. But Stephen didn’t have to be a psychic to tell that she kind of sided with him. Uzimeri turned to face Chenko. There was fire in his eye.

“Zhanna,” he said, “will deliver us. When she says we are to hunt Babushka, she is speaking metaphorically.”

“Metaphorically! What is metaphorical about this! Why are we even speaking? Has Zhanna turned away from Babushka now? Is this why she will not speak in our minds?”

Zhanna stepped forward. She was clearly uncomfortable on a stage in front of a roomful of sleepers. Her voice cracked and she stammered: “N-n-no. We do not speak with our minds because to do so opens us to more attack.”

As if to underscore her words, a low scraping rumble came up through their feet. Somewhere in the depths of Petroska Station, wheels turned.

“We have to have faith,” said Zhanna, “in each other.”

Pitovovich held her head in her hands. The Romanians milled about uncomfortably. Stephen could see why: it was as though the Pope had just declared a crusade against the Holy Ghost while taking a second look at Secular Humanism.

The group became more angry and chaotic. Words were exchanged. Uzimeri yelled. And then all fell silent, as a burbling came from the waters in the pool.

Stephen stepped over to the pool’s edge. Looking down, he could see the floor of the pool opening — leading to a larger chamber, twice as deep, lit by dull beams of light. They cut through a ropy tangle that surrounded a shape like a great shark. It grew in the water. The surface began to rise and churn then, and the thing was momentarily obscured.

And then it broke surface.

Several screamed and choked, as the air filled with the sharp bleach-smell of ammonia. But Stephen held his nose and looked down with wonder.

The giant form of a huge squid bobbed in the water, algae washing down off its silvery back in clotted waves. The eye — a sphere as big as his own head, gleaming in a great singular facet — looked to him, and he looked back into it. A tentacle splashed out of the water and fell onto the metal decking and the bulk of the squid slid back underwater.

The room fell to complete silence.

As they watched, the tentacle slid across the decking — but rather than falling back in the water, it began to make a sound.

Pok-Pok-Pok. Po-pok. Pok.

It was the sound the horned suckers made on bulkhead. It was coming in a particular rhythm:
Pok Pok Pok-po-po-pok. Pok. Pok-po-Pok.

Chenko frowned, counting the
poks
on his fingers. “Is that — ?” and shook his head, but Pitovovich, who was also listening intently, nodded slowly. “It is,” she said.

“What?” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu.

“The squid,” said Chenko, “is communicating in Morse Code.”

The squid waited patiently while they found a pad of paper, then continued. Its first message was simple:

“L-I-S-T-E-N-T-O-S-A-S-H-A.”

And then, when the squid had rested and the message had sunk in, a longer one:

“W-E-A-R-E-F-I-N-E-T-H-A-N-K-Y-O-U-F-O-R-A-S-K-I-N-G-N-O-W-G-O-B-A-C-K-T-O-Y-O-U-R-B-O-A-T-A-N-D-G-E-T-A-M-O-V-E-O-N-T-H-E-S-T-A-T-I-O-N-I-S-N-O-L-O-N-G-E-R-S-A-F-E-L-E-N-A-W-I-L-L-B-E-B-A-C-K-W-E-W-I-L-L-G-O-A-H-E-A-D-O-F-Y-O-U-A-N-D-M-A-K-E-S-U-R-E-T-H-E-W-A-Y-I-S-C-L-E-A-R.”

After much frantic decoding, Chenko wondered precisely how they would do that.

“W-E-H-A-V-E-B-E-E-N-P-R-A-C-T-I-S-I-N-G-F-O-R-D-E-C-A-D-E-S-A-N-D-B-E-S-I-D-E-S-W-E-H-A-V-E-H-E-L-P-N-O-W”

Help from who?

“Y-O-U-K-N-O-W.”

“Alexei,” said Stephen.

“B-I-N-G-O.”

“So why is the station no longer safe?” asked Mrs. Kontos-Wu.

“W-E-A-R-E-G-O-I-N-G-T-O-D-E-S-T-R-O-Y-I-T.”

“Why,” she asked, “would you do that?”

“Y-O-U-T-A-U-G-H-T-U-S-Y-O-U-R-S-E-L-F-I-T-I-S-T-H-E-O-N-E-T-H-I-N-G-B-A-B-U-S-H-K-A-F-E-A-R-S.”

“Destruction?”

“D-E-A-T-H.”

The dreaming war between the Soviet Union and the United States of America was hardly a war at all to hear Fyodor Kolyokov tell it.

“It was more,” said Kolyokov through the lips of Heather, “a series of skirmishes. We had not our heart in it.”

“That so?” said Leo Montassini. He turned back to the view. The two of them — or the three of them, depending on how you looked at it — were holed up at the top of the lighthouse in this fucked-up town. Montassini had managed to hold onto the rifle, and he was using it clock tower style to make sure that the zombies kept clear of the place. It was a pathetic defence — if this Babushka thing wanted to take them out, she had more zombies than Montassini had bullets. But Montassini didn’t feel inclined to follow that line of logic very far. He was in a tower with a rifle, next to a very hot babe who was possessed by an old dead Russian hotel owner who’d finally cheered up enough to start telling him stories about the Cold War, and the zombies weren’t trying to kill him just yet. All of that was fine by Leo Montassini.

“We were unmotivated you see,” said Fyodor Kolyokov. “Why fight at all? Cowardice, for a dream-walker, is a natural state. We live in tanks — in safe cocoons, protected by human puppets. The war required us to actually dream-walk out of body — and attend to other dream-walkers, who had powers the like of which we did not know.”

“Fascinatin’,” said Leo. Kolyokov had been avoiding the subject for hours now. Leo was fine with that. He peered through the glass at the harbour. Another fishing boat was heading out. “When did it happen, this brain war?”

“The early 1970s,” said Kolyokov, then adding — in a voice that, unlike Kolyokov’s, was all-American, “mid-1970s. Please. He’s making this up, you know.”

Leo grinned. “Hey dollface,” he said.

“Hey fuckface,” said Heather sweetly, “did you really just say dollface?” She stepped over to crouch beside Montassini and peered out. “Another boat’s leaving? What’s that — five?”

“Six,” said Montassini. “And I don’t think they’re going out fishing.”

Heather nodded. She put her hand on Montassini’s shoulder, stroking it. “Sorry I called you fuckface,” she said. Leo smirked.

“Don’ mention it,” he said.

“Oh get a room the two of you,” Fyodor Kolyokov interjected, and pulled Heather’s hand away from Montassini’s shoulder. “We don’t have time for that.”

“Well you know, Mr. Kolyokov,” said Leo, “I don’t see much else to do here.” Kolyokov gave Heather’s head a brisk nod and crossed her arms.

“The town is beginning to clear out,” he said with a wistful tone. Then, after a pause that seemed forever:

“We should think about going after Alexei again.”

“We should wait until Vasili Borovich wakes up,” said Heather quickly, and Kolyokov said, “shut up. Vasili’s escaped. We have to get Alexei. And of course — ” he paused “ — the Children.”

“Ah,” said Leo. “Maybe we should just stay put here, big guy.”

“I’m not sure the Children want to be got,” said Heather and Kolyokov said, “you are not sure of anything,” and then he said he was sorry and Heather said it was all right she understood.

Leo sighed, and turned back to the glass, watching the harbour.

Kolyokov would get them killed if he had his way. They’d barely made it here alive after the first rescue attempt, and it had been a bad time.