Rasputin's Bastards

THE LITTLE HERO

The last time Stephen had seen sky was the dawn outside Silifke, just a day ago. It had been something: fluted streamers of cloud pasted against a slate of a sky that ran tones between purple and orange and deep, deep blue. A contrail of some high-flying jet transected it like a filament of gold. There were smells, too — the faintly sweet, faintly corrupt odour of the port, mingled with turpentine-fresh gasoline from the inboard motor of the fishing boat that was taking them out the mouth of the Goksu River to the Mediterranean Sea.

Eyes shut and fists clenched in the tiny midshipman’s cabin they’d given him, Stephen tried to summon that sky. It might just banish the sweating metal pipes and red-painted valves that hovered just three feet over his hard, narrow bunk. But seeing sky through the roof of a submarine was more difficult than discovering Central Park behind Manhattan water towers from the 14th floor of the Emissary. They had been running deep since the fishing boat had unloaded them on the sub’s deck. And the distractions in this place — the thrumming of the engines; the stink of the engines; and the clattering of footsteps and hatches and the occasional words of spoken conversation — made Stephen’s carefully studied exercises all but useless.

If, that was, Zhanna hadn’t been right — and those exercises hadn’t been useless from the beginning.

Stephen opened his eyes and rolled off the bunk. There was just enough room for him to stand up. If he turned to the left a little, there was a little table. If he turned to the right a little, there was the hatch to the submarine’s spinal corridor. If he took one step in any direction, he’d bash his head on a valve or a pipe or one of the dozens of little lozenge-shaped light fixtures that buzzed and clicked through the day.

Stephen cleared his throat.

“Shh!”

A red-fingered, bandaged hand shot out from the bottom bunk. Uzimeri glared up at Stephen. He clasped his hands together as in prayer and rested his head on them, and mouthed: Sleeping.

Fuck off, mouthed Stephen. But he kept quiet. Glancing out into the corridor, he saw that the lights had indeed been turned down. Most of the submarine’s cargo was asleep — and that meant that those who were awake had to keep quiet, because a sudden loud noise to wake one or two of them could spell disaster.

The first time the crew went to sleep, it very nearly did. Uzimeri was in a tiny galley no bigger than a men’s room stall, boiling water for a porridge, and Mrs. Kontos-Wu, Stephen, and two other guests — a thirtyish red-haired woman and a round little man with a thumbprint-sized mole on his cheek — were settled in the cramped mess hall. They’d been in the submarine just a few hours.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu had tried to convince Uzimeri to take it easy — he’d been damn near dead when they’d found him, after all.

“Stephen can cook,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu, taking Uzimeri’s stick-thin arm and guiding him to a seat.

But Uzimeri had refused.

“I am restored,” he said. “I am back amongst my people now. Let me feed you this simple breakfast, yes?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu gave up after that — and Stephen was less worried about making sure Uzimeri was steady on his feet than he was about Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s own interior stability.

After all — she’d seemed fine back in the Emissary, when she’d basically given them up to the mob. She seemed fine now, too. But like a junkie, she could be back into her never-never land of metaphor in a second. Stephen didn’t take his eyes off her as she conversed with the two Russians.

“I am Ilyich,” said the man, in Russian. “This is Tanya.”

“We have been on board since Odessa,” said Tanya. “How was Silifke? Did you happen to visit the Tekir Ambar?”

“The — ?” Mrs. Kontos-Wu frowned, her lips turned up in a question.

“No,” said Tanya. “You would know what that was if you had seen it. It is a great cistern, next to Silifke Castle. There are stairs climbing down the side of it. You can walk to the bottom. It was made by Romans. You can feel their presence in the stones. Ghosts.” Tanya beamed. “Silifke is a wonderful town. The Romans, the Christians — everyone had a hand there. And the people — so friendly!”

“We really didn’t spend much time in the town,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. Stephen put a hand on Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s arm — he was afraid that she’d start to explain to them how it was hard to take the Silifke walking tour when you were locked up in Amar Shadak’s fucking caravansary and sucking back lungsful of tear gas. How you couldn’t get much of a view of the beautiful Roman architecture when you were hiding under a blanket in the back of a delivery truck while it bombed down a mountain road. And how the guy who ran the fishing boat seemed friendly enough in a dream-walked zombie kind of way, but by and large you didn’t get to spend too much quality time with the happy friendly people of Silifke when you were on the run from a psychotic Turkish gangster like Amar Shadak.

But Mrs. Kontos-Wu was all right. She patted Stephen’s hand and gently pushed it from her arm.

“Tell me all about Odessa,” she said. “That’s one place that I’ve never been.”

Ilyich smiled. “Well then that is one place you must visit. Odessa is every—”

His smile vanished then, and he tilted his head as though listening for something. Stephen didn’t hear anything. But the little Russian frowned, and put his finger to his lips.

“Shh,” he said.

Both he and Tanya sat straight in their little seats.

And that was it for their little dining car conversation. Tanya and Ilyich sat up with their hands folded. Mrs. Kontos-Wu did the same. Stephen followed their cue.

It all would have gone swimmingly — were it not for Uzimeri, and his porridge. Stephen later kicked himself for not paying more attention to the frail old Turk, who had insisted on boiling a brimming pot-full of water by himself. When Ilyich has said “shh,” Uzimeri had taken it as Word from the lips of Jesus. So standing not six inches from the edge of the tiny cooking range, Uzimeri had simply stood straight, taken a deep breath — and, after less than a minute, fallen into a dead faint.

There was a clattering and a splashing sound — and when Stephen looked, the first thing he saw was the pot of not-quite-boiling water hissing over the stove element and streaming down onto Konstantine Uzimeri’s right side.

Stephen leapt up from his chair and pushed his way into the galley, just as Uzimeri opened his mouth to scream. Slipping in the puddle on the floor as he did so, Stephen pulled Uzimeri away.

Except that the scream didn’t come. Uzimeri had been scalded — not as badly as if the water had been at a complete boil, but badly enough. His mouth stretched open for an instant, and the tiniest squeak came out. Then it closed and a look of peace came over him.

“What—”

“Shh,” said Uzimeri, then whispered, in a thick Russian accent that Stephen had last heard from Mrs. Kontos-Wu: “Konstantine will be fine. He is in a safe place. Sit here quietly now, Stephen. Until we are all in a safer place. Past Cyprus.”

Later, the young woman to whom the voice belonged would come and meet Stephen and Mrs. Kontos-Wu. Stephen didn’t swing that way, but he could see how this Zhanna girl had managed to charm Uzimeri and the other men guarding Shadak’s warehouse museum. And how they might have thought that it was lust that drove them at first to worship at the feet of the slim-figured, black-haired Russian girl. She was still blinking the sleep-sand out of her eye and had a bad case of bed-head. But with her wide, dark eyes and delicate, half-smiling lips — she could have been a film star.

“Everything is all right now,” she said. “There are a lot of people on Cyprus who have an interest in watching the comings and goings of submarines. But we fooled them.”

“Fooled them? How?” Stephen was intensely curious. Zhanna — and, he supposed, the boy who shushed them — the two of them were the first of Kolyokov’s children that he’d met face to face. When they’d come to the submarine, it was just the small crew of scowling Romanian men who greeted them. And Ilyich and Tanya after that. Zhanna and her family had remained hidden elsewhere on the submarine until Cyprus.

“There is not just one way,” said Zhanna. She spoke quickly, not meeting Stephen’s eye. “Some ways are very old. There is a way of placing a field around a submarine, like a great cloud. It obscures the eye of dream-walkers, and sends the eyes of others looking elsewhere when it passes before them. That works for the people who look on the feeds from spy satellites, and on radar operators if there are not too many of them. If there are too many of them — in places like the base on Cyprus — and they are watching too attentively… we must plan ahead. It is good to have a sleeper on the site. Lucky us — we have three still at Cyprus. So — first we distract — then, sabotage of records. Lots of work for everyone. That is why it is so important to be quiet. None of us can afford to be awakened.”

“Sorry,” said Stephen.

“No harm done.” She smiled shyly. “We got to you through Konstantine, and now we are safe.”

“Lucky for us,” said Stephen. Then he frowned, as he thought of something. “But tell me: Why didn’t you just dream-walk inside of me — shut me up that way?”

“I might have.” She looked at Stephen hard. “But you are very special boy.”

Stephen felt his heart racing at those words. He was special — even if Kolyokov hadn’t recognized it; hadn’t let him develop his special talents. Screw him. Stephen had the dream-walker moves — Zhanna said so.

“Really?” Stephen put his fingers into his belt-loop and leaned back. “Special — in what way?”

“You,” she said, “are a complete cipher to us. So far as we can tell, you have no senses beyond the Physick whatsoever. You alone, Stephen, are entirely safe from we dream-walkers.”

Stephen stood quietly in his quarters for nearly an hour before the alert was over.

“We were passing through the Strait of Gibraltar,” said Uzimeri as he sat up in his bunk. “Very tricky. The British guard that passage jealously. And it is shallow. It is only by the grace of the Most Holy Children that we have been able to pass through it as often as we have.”

Stephen slumped against the bulkhead and glared at Uzimeri. “Stop talking about them like they’re fucking Jesus,” he said.

Uzimeri raised his eyebrows. “This,” he said, “coming from a man who is deaf to the words of the Divine. I think I shall keep my own counsel.”

I’m not deaf to anything! Stephen clenched a fist behind his back and pressed his lips together. What the fuck did Zhanna know anyway? Stephen wasn’t deaf — he was just having a bad patch. Stephen remembered Kolyokov coming to him — in dream, using Discourse. Hadn’t he? Fyodor Kolyokov wouldn’t have taken him on in the first place, if he was completely untalented — would he?

Ah, he could drive himself in circles thinking about this. He turned himself to the matter at hand.

“We’re passing Gibraltar,” he said. “So what — are they taking us home?”

Uzimeri shrugged. “That would depend,” he said, “on what you regard home.”

“Well aren’t you a cryptic man today.” Looking down at Uzimeri, all hunched around his scalded arm and staring back like some crazed zealot, Stephen found himself missing old Richard. At least Richard had the good sense to be fucked up by all the messing that went on with his head. Uzimeri had turned his servitude to advantage. And Stephen — Stephen just didn’t know what to make of it.

“I’m going for a walk,” he said and turned on his heel.

“Good idea, boy,” said Uzimeri. “Why don’t you go on the deck and get yourself some air?”

“Funny Turk,” said Stephen and stepped out into the narrow corridor.

It was maddeningly narrow. And the single deck that was fit for human habitation was crammed with equipment. He couldn’t take more than two steps without having to duck or bend to get around some protuberance. There were, Uzimeri had told him, fifty people on board this submarine. He’d have to take the old man’s word for it. Because there was nowhere on board where you could put all those fifty at once.

It was, thought Stephen, just a bad patch. He couldn’t be completely tone deaf to dream-walkers — because he was, or had been, working an apprenticeship with Fyodor Kolyokov. He’d been to psychic fairs and bought the tapes, and practiced his remote viewing like a kid doing piano scales. Maybe he wasn’t a Chopin — but Stephen wasn’t a failure, either. He walked into poor old Richard’s mind again and again — and Christ! He’d walked into the formidable skull of Amar Shadak, using the telephone lines as a gateway, and seen the ruins of Ankara through his eyes. Over the years he’d had premonitions and visions and on one embarrassing occasion an actual seizure, which old Kolyokov hadn’t completely dismissed as merely an attention-getting device.

Stephen stepped out onto the cramped bridge. There were a half-dozen of Shadak’s Romanian guard here, working the valves and controls like monks at a wine press. These guys weren’t deaf to the words of the Divine. They were so attentive that one touch from Zhanna was all it took to turn them into her slave boys.

Stephen stepped around the periscope, ducking beneath another low-hanging valve. A short, bearded Romanian stepped around Stephen to refer to a chart on the table. Stephen glanced down at it.

“That Gibraltar?” he asked. The Romanian answered with a blandly polite nod. Stephen stared at him — tried to push his way inside his head. For an instant, he thought he might have done so — felt a flow of language, a lifetime of large regrets and little triumphs. But staring into the Romanian’s blinking eyes, Stephen realized that that wasn’t the case. He was just fooling himself. As he always had been, maybe.

“Good then,” said Stephen. He stalked off the bridge.

What if he had always been fooling himself, thought Stephen. If he were to go through his psychic history systematically, he’d be hard-pressed to find an actual event where he had unequivocally managed to subvert one of his subjects. He could get into Richard’s head — or so he thought — and he could seem to affect Richard’s actions. But if Stephen were honest about it, he’d have to admit that most of Richard’s actions were entirely predictable. That was one of the offshoots of the psychic damage that brainwashing had inflicted on him.

And as for Shadak?

Stephen hadn’t done anything but piss the Turkish gangster off. And while he’d used the telephone to do that, Stephen had to admit that he hadn’t really needed any psychic powers to do so.

Maybe Zhanna was right — and Stephen didn’t have any psychic powers at all.

Maybe Fyodor Kolyokov was just stringing him along — just to keep him loyal. As Stephen thought about it, an unswervingly loyal psychic deadhead would be a valuable commodity for a man like Kolyokov. None of the old man’s enemies could dream-walk into the little deaf-brained executive assistant and tell him to stick a letter opener in the Fyodor’s eye. They’d have to bring someone like Mrs. Kontos-Wu across the ocean to do it.

Stephen bent down through a circular hatch. Crawled past some more bunks, underneath was almost as big as the bridge — mostly because two of the six torpedoes that would store here had been fired. Stephen hoisted himself onto one of the empty bays and stretched out. Craning his neck, he could see most of the way down the narrow tube that led to the ocean.

He shut his eyes, and tried to imagine what might lie beyond that tube now. Tried to picture the ocean, the sunken wrecks — the trio of ship-sized squid that accompanied the submarine like an escort of jet fighters as it made its way out into the Atlantic.

“Ah, fuck.” Stephen’s voice buzzed and hummed off the metal walls that confined him here. Giant squid. How rich. How fucking Captain Nemo.

He really was a fuckup when it came to dream-walking.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu was radiant. She looked, thought Stephen uncharitably, like she’d just been laid.

“Get out of the fucking torpedo tube, Haber,” she said. “We’ve got lots to talk about.”

“This isn’t the tube,” said Stephen as he rolled off the empty torpedo bay and clanged noisily onto the grated decking. He pointed to the fore. “That’s the tube.”

“Whatever.” Mrs. Kontos-Wu leaned against the opposite bank of torpedoes. “Lots has been happening since we got on board this submarine, and we’ve decided that it’s not fair you shouldn’t be in the loop.”

“We?”

“I’ll get to that. But first, let’s deal with what we came here for.”

Stephen gave her a look.

“The mystery of the children,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “What happened to them, why we were hijacked at sea, all that.”

“Ah. For a second there I thought you meant why we gave ourselves up to the

Mafia and let ourselves be gassed in Amar Shadak’s fucking headquarters.”

“You’re angry about that, are you?”

Stephen sighed. “What about the children?” he said.

“Well. First off — did you make the connection with Ilyich and Tanya?”

“The connection?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu rolled her eyes. “Here’s a hint: their last names are Chenko and Pitovovich.”

Stephen thought a moment. “Weren’t they the ones involved—” he snapped his fingers. “They were! Pitovovich is the lawyer from St. Petersburg, and Chenko is her — her man in Odessa. The one who found the kids and set them up in a dormitory. Right?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu nodded. “True as far as it goes.”

“I guess those email addresses are pretty redundant.” Stephen frowned, working it out. “But what are they doing here?”

“They’ve been with the children for many days now,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “The children — they look after their own.” Her eyes batted then, and her face took on an expression that Stephen had never seen before.

“You okay?” Stephen was worried she was slipping back into her metaphor again while a dream-walker stepped inside. He looked around for a weapon.

But Mrs. Kontos-Wu wasn’t going into metaphor. There was no dream-walker. She sniffed, and dabbed her eye with her sleeve.

“Shit,” said Stephen. “Are you crying?”

“Fu-fu-fu-fuck off.”

“You are crying,” said Stephen wonderingly. “Shit, Kontos-Wu. Shit. I didn’t think your tear ducts even worked anymore.”

“Fuck off. All right?” Mrs. Kontos-Wu looked up, sniffed noisily, and cleared her throat. “Pitovovich and Chenko are both sleepers from way back. For most of their lives, they’d been deactivated. Both were apparent GRU operatives. Pitovovich maintained a secondary cover in St. Petersburg as a lawyer, and Chenko was more open — he was a Colonel, and operated a station in Odessa and dealt with informants and so forth.”

“So wait a second. Chenko was a sleeper agent in the GRU? Isn’t that redundant?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu shrugged and dabbed her eyes. “Our missing colleague Alexei Kilodovich was a sleeper in its predecessor the KGB. You don’t think the bureau felt the need to spy on itself from time to time?”

Stephen always marvelled at the layers of paranoia that formed the strata of this organization that had abused and murdered his parents.

“How could I have been so naïve?” he said.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu chuckled. Stephen was amazed: first tears, now laughter.

“Chenko first met the kids eight months ago. It wasn’t exactly as Shadak understood it. A brood of them showed up in an old school bus — at an apartment block that Chenko found himself owning. Chenko had, unbeknownst to himself, taken a sizeable chunk of the station’s slush fund and thrown it into real estate. He’d put a half-dozen of his local muscle to work, clearing the place out and doing what minor repairs were required. Chenko met the kids — there were fifteen of them at that point — out front, and hurried them upstairs to the special suite he’d prepared.”

“Special?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu nodded. “It was sterilized. Had to be. It was going to be a birthing room.”

“What?”

“That was one of the things Chenko didn’t tell Shadak,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “Zhanna arrived in Odessa pregnant. She gave birth just a day after they arrived.”

“Pregnant.” Stephen crossed the narrow torpedo room and leaned beside her. “What — who did she give birth to?”

“They named him Vladimir,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “He’s a very special baby.”

“Who are these kids?” said Stephen. “They’re like Fyodor Kolyokov is — was. Are they relatives of his? What? Why did he want them?”

“You ever hear,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu, “of City 512?”

“No.”

“Me either. At least not — not at first.”

Ah fuck, thought Stephen. She’s tearing up again.

“What is with you?” he said. “You’ve never been this — this close to the surface before.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu smiled weakly. “That’s so true,” she said.

“So what is it? What is it about this City 512?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu took a breath. “Well — as it turns out — it’s the place where I was made.”

“Where is it?”

“I don’t know. Somewhere in Russia. The place is mostly underground — very secret, obviously — and it’s where Kolyokov — where he worked before he came to the United States.”

Stephen nodded. “Okay. That’s where he learned how to dream-walk. Where the sleepers like you came from. It’s also where these kids came from. That makes sense. They can dream-walk like Kolyokov could. So why’re you all misty?”

“Because,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu, taking a deep breath, “I’ve known all that. All my life I’ve known all that. If I really concentrated — really pushed it — I could remember that I spent my childhood in a bunker in the Soviet Union. I could remember that these — these men from City 512 — took me and turned me into their puppet. But every time I would do that — it’d slip away. And I’d think about Bishop’s Hall. Where I went to finishing school to be a proper fucking young lady.”

“But you don’t have that problem now,” said Stephen. “So what’s the problem?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu looked at Stephen. “Do you ever think back to the night your parents tried to kill you?”

“All the time,” said Stephen.

“Is it getting better?”

He thought about that for a second. “You mean less painful? Sure. I guess. Time heals, you know?”

“Well,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu, “I haven’t had the luxury of time. This shit is fresh pain for me, because I haven’t been able to look at it squarely until now. So — so — please — fucking — excuse me — if I’m — a little—”

Stephen tried to duck out of the way as Mrs. Kontos-Wu lunged at him. She wrapped both arms around his neck, and Stephen prepared for the inevitable crack! as she snapped it. The unmerciful end. But all he felt was hot tears soaking through his shirt.

“—if I’m a little emotional!” Mrs. Kontos-Wu wailed.

“Oh.” Belatedly, Stephen raised a hand and patted Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s sobbing shoulder. He felt like it was the creepiest thing he’d ever done — but he kept at it, this comforting thing, until she closed her eyes and drifted to sleep.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu cleaned herself up for dinner. But she kept to herself as the five of them — her, Tanya, Ilyich, Stephen, and Uzimeri — sat around the little galley table eating their poached fish and rice. The engines thrummed and made the cutlery rattle where it sat. The mess smelled of fish and oil and battery acid.

“She is going through another phase in her recovery,” said Uzimeri. “Do not worry about her.”

Ilyich Chenko nodded. “We all went through this,” he said. “These children — they’re not like other dream-walkers we may have encountered. They need our help, but they don’t want to keep us tied up and in their unthinking thrall. So they release us. That is good — for it is always better to be a free man than a puppet. But it is also painful at first. Memory comes upon you in a torrent. Quite distressing. I am still sorting mine out.”

Tanya Pitovovich smiled and laughed. “I’ll take the pain of memory any day,” she said around a forkful of fish, “over oblivion.”

Chenko clapped and laughed. “Good,” he said. “We must all be so brave.”

Tanya reached across the table and held Ilyich’s hand. Stephen had to fight to keep from rolling his eyes.

Stephen cleared his throat.

“Tell me about the children,” he said. “Tell me about Vladimir.”

Ilyich disengaged from Tanya’s hand. “Vladimir,” he said. “The baby. You’ve heard about him?”

“Mrs. Kontos-Wu said he was born — in Odessa was it?”

“That’s right. We made a special room for it, in the top floor apartment. Whitewashed the walls and ceiling, tore up the carpets and scrubbed the floors down to the boards. The children brought two midwives with them. Pretty German girls. One had tattoos all up her arms and hair shaved short to her skull. The other one was a yellow-haired girl who couldn’t have been more than twenty years old. I wouldn’t have taken them for midwives. But they knew their stuff. They put me to work soon enough. ‘Boil the water, Chenko!’ ‘Bring the cloth, Chenko!’ ‘Stand here!’ ‘Out of the way!’ I did as I was told. It was good to have work to do, because it’s an incredible, terrible thing when a child is born. A woman comes apart for the occasion — split up the middle — and for a long time, it’s all blood and screaming. The pain is — indescribable.”

“How would you know?”

“I was assigned to be her coach,” said Ilyich. “That meant that I shared the pain of it with her — because of what she is, I shared it quite literally.”

“That’s a pisser,” said Stephen.

“No,” said Ilyich, “really it’s not. It was an agony — but when the baby Vladimir finally emerged — well, it was like looking upon the sun after spending a decade in gulag. Don’t wince. You asked about Vladimir and I’m telling you. The baby was special. When he looked at you, he was really looking at you: not like most babies, who just point their unformed little eyeballs in your direction and blink for two weeks. Vladimir could see. And he had — he had a voice.”

“A voice. What did he say to you?”

“‘Hello Ilyich Chenko. I am sorry.’”

“Fuck off.”

“No. That is what he said. ‘Hello Ilyich Chenko. I am sorry.’ I remember it like I remember my name. It seemed as though I could hear it with my ears. But it was not with my ears. He was speaking in my head. Using the immense powers of his mind.”

“Fuck. Off.” Stephen didn’t like being jerked around. “You’re telling me that a newborn baby called you by name and apologized.”

“I don’t blame you for being skeptical. I did not believe it myself when it happened. ‘Which one of you said that?’ I demanded. The midwives had no idea what I was talking about. Zhanna, who held her bloody little baby crooked in her arm, just ignored me. I didn’t repeat the question, because it was then that it dawned upon me that none of those three girls could have said what I heard. For the baby spoke in a voice that was deep and melodious. The voice of a grown man. And there were no men in the room but I.”

“All right,” said Stephen, “so the newborn baby got a good look at you, figured out your name, and then he spoke inside your head. And his first words were, ‘I’m sorry.’ What was he sorry for?”

“As it turned out, pretty much everything,” said Ilyich. “But immediately, he was sorry for having used me to establish this base of operations; for siphoning Zhanna’s pain of childbirth; for robbing me of my time and my money. Plenty to apologize for.”

“But he didn’t let you free.”

“Oh yes — that was to be the bargain. As he suckled at his mother, he told me I could leave any time I wanted to. But he asked me if I would stay and help him and the others finish their work.”

“And you agreed.”

“Yes,” said Uzimeri. “We all agreed, boy. Because we saw the light of Vladimir. We—”

Ilyich raised his hand, and Uzimeri nodded. He shut his mouth, and Ilyich continued.

“There were eighteen children with Zhanna and Vladimir. They were siblings. They ranged from three years old to eighteen. The closest thing they had to a parent was Zhanna — and she was their sister. It was hard at first to learn much about them. They rarely spoke, although they didn’t seem to have much trouble communicating with one another. Mostly I spoke with Zhanna and Vladimir — and that was mainly to take instruction: ‘Bring us groceries, Chenko’; ‘We require medicine, Chenko’; ‘What can you do about some new clothes, Chenko?’ That kind of thing. The rest of the children kept to their rooms — staring at one another and occasionally nodding or shaking a head.”

Stephen nodded himself now. “Discourse,” he said.

“Yes. They were engaged in what you call Discourse. It was two months before they introduced me to it. It was an icy November night, and I was frustrated. My superiors in Moscow were raising questions about the apartment block and some other unauthorized purchases I’d made. There was talk of replacing me in Odessa, with someone more reliable. I’d just received news of this, through a contact of mine in the Kremlin. The children, when I arrived, were sitting in a tight circle underneath a frosted skylight — hands joined and eyes shut. Vladimir was in the middle, apparently asleep. Zhanna met me at the door and pulled me aside.

“‘This is private business, Ilyich,’ she said. ‘Go away.’

“I am afraid that I became very angry. I said all kinds of things, all of which boiled down to this: that I may indeed go away, to someplace where none of them would see me anymore, because of the resources that the group of them demanded.

“‘You use me like a bank,’ I said. ‘And what do you give in return? I’ve a mind to leave right now. Make my way in America, perhaps.’

“For the first time since I’d met her, Zhanna looked genuinely alarmed. She pulled me to a side bedroom and sat me down on the bed. ‘You cannot mean that,’ she said.

“Of course, I did not mean that — I couldn’t. The children exerted a force on me even then. But I was angry and Zhanna saw that, and she decided then to appease me.

“‘Lie down,’ she commanded. ‘Loosen your belt. Unbutton your shirt collar. Remove your shoes. And close your eyes.’

“I did as I was told — although I had no idea what to expect. I admit, the idea that Zhanna might make love to me crossed my mind. But I knew in my heart that this was not in her plans. She wanted to show me something else. Something — greater.”

Uzimeri set his cutlery down and looked heavenward. Tanya and Stephen shared a glance.

“Discourse,” said Ilyich. “Zhanna set about to show me the raw magnificence of Discourse.”

Stephen sighed. Of course she was. “What was it like?” he asked.

Ilyich was ready with a description. “Like a drug,” he said. “Like a drug that lets you listen to a stadium full of chattering grandmothers — and hear what each of them is saying.”

“No,” said Uzimeri. “That’s not entirely right. You are not hearing what they are saying — you are feeling it. In your soul!” He thumped his chest. “Discourse is the language of the Soul!”

“Konstantine,” Tanya said, “the children do not even admit the existence of a soul. You only feel what you imagine you feel. The Discourse is entirely physical—”

“—and yet,” said Ilyich, “it brings such a great sense of peace to us when we are permitted to enter it. And the visions — I haven’t even begun with the visions yet.”

“You see?” said Uzimeri to Tanya. “Visions. Visions! A thing of the soul.”

“A thing of the optic nerve,” said Tanya.

“Why does this always have to get theological with you two?” said Ilyich. “Cannot we accept the truth and value of inner peace without attaching a religious connotation to the experience?”

“Who said anything about religion?” said Uzimeri.

“Oh, come on,” began Tanya. “You haven’t said anything else since—”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu started to rise. “E-excuse me,” she said.

“Of course.” Uzimeri slid out from his seat to let Mrs. Kontos-Wu pass. She hurried away to aft, down the corridor. The sounds of her sobs echoed off the bulkheads.

It was finally Tanya who broke the silence around the table.

“It is difficult,” she said, “for all of us at first.”

Whatever their intentions may have been at the beginning of the day, after dinner, none of them — not Mrs. Kontos-Wu, not Uzimeri nor Chenko nor Pitovovich — seemed inclined to bring Stephen any more up to speed. So that night, Stephen decided to take the matter into his own hands. He went to see the Children.

They were holed up in the officer’s section. It wasn’t far — nothing was far on the antique Russian submarine — but it felt to Stephen as though he were passing through a time zone when he stepped through the round hatchway and into the wood-panelled corridor leading to the Captain’s suite. They’d placed one of their Romanian monks there as a guard, and Stephen half-expected trouble from him. But he just looked at Stephen, nodded, and said in imperfect Russian: “Go on through. Zhanna is expecting you. Third hatch on left.”

Stephen passed four rooms before Zhanna’s, each one open — each with a small form swaddled in thick wool blankets on the narrow bed. They weren’t really that small. Zhanna’s crew of “children” were mostly in their teens. Over the course of his stay, he’d seen two of them — but understood there were seven that had stayed behind on the submarine after the encounter with Shadak’s boat in the Atlantic. The children all seemed to be sleeping now — one, a heavyset boy with his hair cut very short, lay on his back snoring softly as Stephen tiptoed past.

He had no trouble finding Zhanna’s cabin. Light from it painted a sickly yellow square on the opposite side of the corridor. Zhanna was sitting up at the room’s little desk. She smiled at Stephen when he appeared in the doorway.

“Not a step further,” she said.

“All right.” He raised his hands palm outward. “I’ll stay here.”

“Good. Because you know, if you think you can pull anything — I’ve got a man in the cabin behind you and to fore with a gun aimed at your back. Go ahead — look.”

“A gun in a submarine?” Stephen turned around and peered into the cabin across the hall. A man peered back at him with glassy, determined eyes. He held an old Russian automatic pistol, aimed straight at Stephen’s chest. “You sure that’s wise?”

“I don’t expect to have to use it,” said the man, his deep voice taking on the accent and cadence of Zhanna’s. “Just don’t get any ideas.”

“Why would I get any ideas?”

The Romanian meat puppet continued: “You’re the right hand of the evil bastard Fyodor Kolyokov; you’ve received instructions from him, from the lips of his operative Mrs. Kontos-Wu, to deal with us and bring us home to him; you are a young man — and I, I am told, am a beautiful woman who many men desire. And I cannot see your thoughts to put my mind at ease on any of these things. So I am taking a precaution.”

“Okay, well first off — you don’t have to worry about me ravaging—” he stopped himself, then turned back to Zhanna, whose eyelids were fluttering with the effort of controlling her commandeered bodyguard. “Could you please stop that? I came to talk to you. Not some — some surrogate mouthpiece.”

Zhanna blinked and looked at Stephen. She took a deep breath, and patted her chest and shoulders. “Just so we understand one another,” she said.

“Perfectly.”

“You may sit down,” She motioned toward her narrow bunk. Stephen sat so that he had a good view of both Zhanna and the Romanian guard outside.

“I have some questions,” he said.

Zhanna turned around to face him. She crossed one leg over the other and smiled. “I like questions.”

“Um. Okay. First, I want to know about your son.”

“My son?” She frowned. “Oh! Vladimir! Yes — he is my son. You must excuse me. I don’t usually think of him that way.”

“Why’s that? You gave birth to him.”

“Yes. And I carried him for nine months. But he was not given me in the regular way. No husband — no sex. Just a long needle and a doctor. Do you know that technically, I am still a virgin?”

“Um, right. No. I didn’t.”

“It is true. For I have lived only among brothers and sisters. And the few technicians and scientists that maintained City 512 after the Revolution. Now some of those desired me, and I might have — but they were filthy old men who—”

Stephen interrupted. “Vladimir?” he said.

“Oh yes — of course. Forgive me, Stephen.” Spots of red appeared in Zhanna’s pale cheeks, and she looked down at her hands. “I don’t talk to people — I mean, just talk to people — without knowing their thoughts also. It is unusual, this — talk. Having to guess what you are thinking of me as we talk.” Zhanna looked back up and met Stephen’s eyes. “Ask your questions.”

“What is Vladimir?” said Stephen. “Ilyich Chenko claimed the baby could speak when he was born.”

“Vladimir could speak long before he was born,” said Zhanna. “We had many conversations as I carried him. That is how we were able to leave — to make it all the way to this submarine without being caught or killed. Vladimir guided us all. I think he spoke his first words—” she squinted one eye and looked away, as though trying to remember “—after four months. ‘We must rejoin the others,’ he said to me. ‘It is nearly time.’ You asked me what Vladimir is — not who. That is a good way to phrase the question.”

Stephen waited. “And the answer is — ?”

“I don’t know,” said Zhanna. “I don’t think that Vladimir knows. He is something that they had been planning for a very long time. But I do not think they know what he is either.”

“You mean they,” said Stephen, “as in City 512.”

“At least,” said Zhanna. “Yes. They at City 512, at the very least of it. We were all a part of a grand experiment there. Each generation, would be better and brighter and more nimble than the last. Do you know that our grandparents could barely manage to dream-walk if they were locked in an isolation tank? That the slightest breath of air would send them scurrying back into their bodies? That they could only communicate properly with poor wretches — who had been conditioned for years to open their thoughts to a dream-walker? They could barely stand the sea. And now — look at us! Look at… Hey. What is happening with your face?”

Stephen started, sat up. “What do you mean?”

Zhanna leaned forward and squinted. “Colour is draining from it. Your eyes are looking down at your hands. And you were shaking your head. What does that mean?”

“You can’t read my mind,” he said, “so you have no idea — do you?”

There was a shuffling in the hallway as the Romanian crossed it and stepped into the room. He brought the barrel of the gun up to Stephen’s face. “You are playing with me,” he said in a voice like Zhanna’s. “You think that because I cannot read your mind that you have the upper hand in this.”

“I don’t think I have the upper hand in this,” said Stephen carefully. “I don’t think I have any hand in this.”

The Romanian jerked the gun away, and raised it over his head, as if to strike. Stephen took a breath. But he didn’t flinch away.

“Would you like to fuck him?” said the Romanian.

“What?”

The Romanian stared at him matter-of-factly. “You like to lie with men, and not women. That is what Kontos-Wu knows for a fact. So there is no hope for you and I. But perhaps — I thought with this one…”

Stephen turned to Zhanna and stared at her. He had no idea what to say.

Zhanna opened her eyes. The Romanian shook his head, looked at the gun in his hand, at Zhanna, at Stephen. He muttered something in a reverent tone and stepped away. Stephen wondered if this guy had had any idea that he’d just been offered up as a sex toy by his high priestess.

Zhanna put a hand to her forehead and scrunched her eyes shut. Her mouth tightened.

“Hey,” said Stephen. He reached across and patted Zhanna’s knee. More fucking tears, he thought with an unkindness that made him ashamed. “Don’t cry,” he said.

Zhanna stopped. She put her hand on Stephen’s, pulled it further up the fabric of her pants. She rolled her chair towards him. “Can it be — ?” she said, eyes widening with a creepy kind of optimism.

Stephen yanked his hand away. Zhanna took it like a slap on the face.

“I’m sorry!” she bawled, pulling her hands to her chest, raising her knees to her chin. “I’m sorry! I’m no good at this, Stephen! No good!”

Stephen was jolted by a sudden spark of empathy. It was not unlike the times when he thought he’d gotten into Richard’s skull, or walked behind Amar Shadak’s eyelids. This poor girl had lived her life in this City 512. Everyone she spoke to, she did through the stark honesty of Discourse. Those who didn’t have the talent or training to speak back were open books to her. If a man wanted to sleep with her, he’d broadcast his intentions clearly — even though his eyes might be discreetly averted and his hands busied with paperwork or at a computer keyboard. Zhanna had lived a life without guesswork. She was about as intuitive as Stephen was psychic.

Stephen reached out again. He put his hand on Zhanna’s trembling shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Look. Don’t — don’t cry. But I’ll lay it out for you. Your intelligence is good on one thing: I’m queer. Here’s another fact Mrs. Kontos-Wu might not know: I’m HIV positive. You know what that means?”

“Y-yes,” said Zhanna. She nuzzled Stephen’s hand with her chin. “You’ve got the AIDS. I am sorry.”

“It’s shitty,” Stephen agreed. “But I’m not exactly sick with AIDS yet. I’ve just got the virus — and I’m not going to go spreading it around here.”

Zhanna opened her eyes and looked at him with fierce determination. “One day, we will cure the AIDS.”

“That’s what they say,” said Stephen.

“No,” she said, firmly, “one day we will cure the AIDS. That will be a part of the new world that we design.”

Stephen smiled.

“New world. It’s no wonder that they’re making a religion out of you with ambitions like that.”

Zhanna lifted her head and snorted derisively. “The religion. That’s foolishness. Like the Babushka nonsense.”

“Babushka.” Stephen sighed with inward relief; it looked as though Zhanna was as anxious to steer the conversation back to normalcy as he was. “There’s that word again. Who is Babushka?”

“Ask me questions I can answer,” said Zhanna. “I’m not sure who Babushka is. She contacted Vladimir when he was two months old. She convinced him that he could come to North America — arrange passage there — and together, they could bring everyone together. End the oppression. Now that Vladimir is there, however — he’s not so sure. Babushka — whatever, whoever she is — she’s the one who turned this into a religion. And that wasn’t what any of us wanted.”

“That’s right,” said Stephen. “Vladimir wanted to do the Spartacus thing.” Zhanna gave him a quizzical look. “Free the slaves,” he explained. “That’s what he told Ilyich Chenko. And now — now he’s with this Babushka, against his will?”

Zhanna nodded.

“Is that where we’re going then? To Babushka?”

“Not right away,” said Zhanna, “and when we do, we’ll not go by ourselves.”

“Then when — and with who?”

“After we go deep,” said Zhanna, “to Petroska Station. We need the help of the Mystics. And we have to go deep to find them.”

“Mystics?” said Stephen. “Petroska Station? Who are—?”

Zhanna stopped him. “Stephen,” she said, “I am sorry. But no more questions. I must — I must talk with my brothers and sisters for a while. This communication in the Physick is exhausting. And there will just be more pain if we keep it up longer.”

“I'll go." He pushed himself up and slid into the dark corridor. The guard was gone when he got to the hatchway back to the part of the submarine reserved for mortals. Stephen ducked through it and slunk his way back to his cabin

Stephen lay in his bunk with his eyes shut. Below him, Konstantine Uzimeri kept up a regular, wheezing snore that mingled with the irregular drone of the engines, and the clanking of the pipes over their heads. Occasionally, Stephen coul hear the clattering and clanking as the Romanian crew went about their busines operating the old Foxtrot submarine. Stephen watched the multicoloured patterns of retinal ghosts crawl across the inside of his eyelids. They could be anything, he thought, as he drifted off to sleep. They could be squids — seven of them now, submarinal giants with deep eyes and tentacles as long as a ship — following in the frothing wake of the Foxtrot, as it dove ever deeper to its rendezvous with the Mystics in Petroska Station.

They could be squids. They could be anything.