Rasputin's Bastards

THE IDIOT

—a roar of a gunshot — and that had finished it for Stephen.

Now he lay shaking on the floor of the machine shop, staring up at the buzzing lights. Discourse was finished — and he was out — out of the loop and out of tricks. Even when drunk, Fyodor Kolyokov hadn’t given him any useful advice on dream-walking, and nothing — not a word — about what he presumed now to be the art of dream-fighting.

Stephen opened his eyes. Fuck it. He was imagining things. That was no better than his plain. He wondered if he might not just be going crazy in this place at the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

Well, fine. He got up. It hurt to move, but that was fine too. He didn’t think he was imagining that. Stephen stood up and stepped around a device. He climbed up a short set of metal steps and plodded forward into a machine shop. There, one of the Romanians sat huddled, his knees clasped to his chest. He rocked slightly, humming something with easy, comforting cadences that sounded like a nursery song. Stephen bent beside him.

“Babushka?” said Stephen. “Alexei? Zhanna? Petra?”

The Romanian looked back at him with fresh, wet eyes, and Stephen thought: No one. No one but you.

He patted the Romanian on the shoulder, and went on forward.

As he climbed the steps into the officer’s corridor, he wondered: what did the poor Romanian signify? Territory gained — territory lost? Or maybe just that ambiguous, volatile state of a territory that had simply been liberated?

Stephen froze at the top of the stairs. Halfway down the corridor, Mrs. Kontos-Wu crouched. She was aiming a gun at him.

“Stephen?”

“It’s me,” he said carefully, thinking back to the Emissary Hotel when she’d twisted his nuts and really damn near killed him. “Who are you? Babushka? Lois? Zhanna?”

To his relief, Mrs. Kontos-Wu lowered the gun. “Jean,” she said. “It’s just Jean now.”

“Ah.” Stephen still proceeded carefully. The fact that Mrs. Kontos-Wu was standing over what appeared to be two bodies did not escape him. “What are you—”

“Guarding,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “Alexei told me to guard the Children.”

Stephen looked at the Romanians then up at Mrs. Kontos-Wu. He slowly started forward in the corridor. “All right,” he said. “Then I’ll help you.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu shrugged. Stephen opened his mouth to say something else, but he stopped when Mrs. Kontos-Wu put her finger to her mouth.

Right. The Children were sleeping.

Stephen stepped to the opposite side of the corridor and crouched against the wall. Mrs. Kontos-Wu smiled wearily, and Stephen smiled back.

And in this way they sat in the quiet hallway while the dreaming war waged silently around them.

Stephen awoke with a start. He had dozed off at some point, and everything had changed. Mrs. Kontos-Wu was gone — and in her place was Zhanna. She bent over him — looking at him with a sweet tenderness. Stephen blinked and looked around. Mrs. Kontos-Wu was gone! Why hadn’t she wakened him?

“Where is Jean?”

“She went ahead,” said Zhanna. “I said she should. I wanted to bring you along myself.”

“Along? Along where?”

“Come,” she said, pulling him to his feet. “We are to have a meeting.”

“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.”