Rasputin's Bastards

THE IDIOT

Alexei Kilodovich and Vladimir climbed to the top of the aerie and faced the Koldun, Vasili Borovich. He was tied to a chair, and in rough shape. He regarded Alexei levelly.

“Name the smells,” said Alexei.

“What?”

“That is what you said to me, just days past,” said Alexei. “‘Name the smells.’ As if by doing so I would be welcomed to this magnificent community that you have built here in Canada. It made me very sentimental and trusting to you. And then you fucking set me up for a killing.”

“I had no idea,” said Borovich, “who you were.”

“That,” said Alexei, “is bullshit. You knew me well enough to kill me.” Borovich struggled in his bonds. “Only enough to know that Lena — the

Babushka — wanted you alive. That she had a special purpose for you.”

“Bullshit,” said Alexei.

It is true, said Vladimir. Babushka asked and asked about you. We did not tell her anything.

“Borovich tried to kill you too,” said Alexei.

“The Children?” Borovich looked back and forth between the two of them — and to Montassini, who was standing behind Kilodovich like a mob enforcer. “Yes — again, only because the Babushka wanted them so.”

“This does not cause me to feel better,” said Alexei.

“You don’t know what the Babushka can do when she has everything she wants.”

Alexei shook his head. “Take the world over — live in the backs of the brains of everyone on this planet. Change the names of things to suit her tastes, and live forever.”

Borovich glared at him.

“And you,” said Alexei, “would have stood for it — if she had loved you properly. Yes?”

“Oh God,” said the Koldun.

Alexei felt himself grow before him. His head was scraping the ceiling of this aerie. Robes flowed from him like liquid. And the thing in his belly stirred and reached across the space to Borovich. Vladimir started to snuffle and tear up at the sight of the thing.

“I think,” said Alexei, “you shall be unravelled.”

“What the fuck is goin’ on here?” said Montassini. “You okay, Alex?”

“Oh God,” said Borovich.

And Alexei said, “No. The lie.”

In 1976, Borovich awoke in Toronto. He had connived an assignment here — and it was a poor one. He worked the University of Toronto — pulling students here and there into a suite of rooms he kept in an old house in Parkdale, near the lake, seeing if he could manage the slow technique of remaking them for City 512. He could not, of course, on his own — the techniques were too difficult in those days for one to do alone. But it was rumoured that Lena, who had been there two decades earlier, had perfected a technique. She was gone, but Borovich had convinced certain others that he might continue the work. So he occupied his flat and whiled away the days.

“You did nothing here, did you?” said Alexei.

Borovich squinted at him. Alexei was sitting on a rattan chair at the back of Borovich’s house. Behind him, the skeletal phallus of the half-finished CN Tower rose up. Borovich looked at his hands — still smooth, long fingers with nails bitten to the quick.

“You were desperate,” said Alexei, “to find Babushka.”

“That was not her name,” said Borovich, “then.”

“Yes,” said Alexei. “You are so disgusted with her — with your choice of her. Because you are such an honourable man.”

And Borovich’s eyes fluttered shut — as a great black thing pierced his middle — and he remembered finding her; finding, in addition to all those university students, the names on a list of sleepers that Lena had made, and hunting them. Getting angrier and angrier as one after another turned out to have quit their jobs and left their families and abandoned their lives, to disappear from the world. He dreamed and scoured the world looking for their signatures — seeking them out.

Finally, one night in the midst of a July heat wave, he found one. His name was Jack King. He was staying in the Royal York Hotel, just having arrived by train, with nothing but a suitcase containing a change of clothing, a small automatic pistol and a little packet of subway tokens. He was on his way to Parkdale — to murder an upstart who was getting too close.

Borovich had smiled to himself — made a note of his room number, and gotten one of the few sleepers he managed to control: Alice, her name was, an undergraduate political science student at U of T. She was small-boned and slender but for a tiny potbelly and thick, dark brows that accentuated her eyes. He sent her over to the hotel; made her knock on his room door; and when he answered, step inside and say: “Do not be hasty, Lena. I bring this gift.”

Lena accepted it graciously — he had not been with her long, but he’d been with her long enough to know her tastes. At the end of the night, her sleeper had said: “All right, Vasili. You may join us. But you must bring gifts.”

It was two and a half years before Vasili could assemble gifts rich enough for Lena’s tastes. He raided the Hermitage, the treasure vaults of the Kremlin, riding sleepers at the highest level of the party. Where necessary —

“You murdered,” said Alexei. “You murdered people who had nothing to do with this. It is fascinating.”

“How can — how can you be here?” said Borovich, manipulating a KGB Colonel named Vlochma to wrap his lips around a gun barrel.

Alexei sat beside him, crouched in the younger man’s mind.

“Was it worth it?”

Vasili looked at him, tears in his eyes. “Of course not,” he said. “What are you doing? How can you be here?”

Alexei was about to answer when another voice came up around them in a great, angry cloud.

“It is obvious, my love,” said Babushka. “He is the Destroyer.”

Heather stopped at the top of the wooden stairway that led down the cliff, to the main town of New Pokrovskoye. “Mi mi mi mi mi,” she said aloud. “Mi!”

“All right!” said Kolyokov. “Enough with your mantra! You can stop now.”

“Is it safe?”

“Maybe,” said Kolyokov. “Who knows? But I need to think and that Goddamn mantra is making it impossible.”

“Sorry.” Heather sat down on the edge of the stairs and looked out over the village. There were some lights on — and she could see shadows moving in front of those lights — but the town had an eerie quiet to it.

She took a deep breath, and felt an odd squirming in her middle. Was that Fyodor Kolyokov? Like some twisted foetus, making itself at home in her uterus? It felt creepy, but also kind of good. She was getting used to sharing her body with the old zombie. At least with Kolyokov, you knew where you stood. Holden Gibson had done the same thing with her, with the rest of them, on a whim.

Fyodor Kolyokov had enough respect for her to pay for his time.

And really, Heather had to admit that there was something oddly liberating being dream-walked by an old creature like Fyodor Kolyokov. As she sat there thinking, her hands worked in her lap — fingers counting. She heard muttered Russian coming from her lips. It faltered here and there — like a grandparent. Kolyokov was getting on — she didn’t know how long he’d be with her.

Her hands fell into her lap then, and she felt her head turning toward the lighthouse.

She blinked at the sight of it: the top surrounded by sparking blue electricity — its very tip connecting with a whirling, silent funnel cloud that drew down from the otherwise clear night sky. Then he turned her head to the port — where now could be heard the high-pitched hum of an outboard motor. A boat was coming in to the harbour.

“Start singing your mantra again,” said Kolyokov. “We must go meet that boat.”

Alexei Kilodovich and Vasili Borovich stood on the remains of a cracked riverbed. Mountains rimmed the horizon, but the land that led to them was flat and dry and monotonous. The sky was more interesting. It was filled with a great bruise of a cloud; a cloud that bled and pulsated and burned with a terrible fever. It had a kind of face to it — an alien face, that expressed unguessable emotions. Vasili tried to shrink away from it, but Alexei would have none of that. He stared up into it, unapologetically.

“You,” said the face, “have been ill-used.”

“Do not blame yourself,” said Alexei.

“I do not apologize,” said the cloud. “It is a statement of fact. I had wondered, when we first met, just what it was you are. And you know — with the potential that you carried, you might have lived a much better time on this earth.”

“Like your Vasili?”

The cloud rumbled. “Vasili? Is he here?”

Alexei gestured to his feet, where Vasili Borovich lay huddled.

“Ah,” said the cloud. “The traitor. He is of no consequence. He is barely here — thanks to you.”

Sure enough, Borovich seemed to be fading from this place. Alexei could see the ground through his insubstantial flesh.

“Of course,” said the cloud, “if you wanted to, you could return him here.”

“I see no need.”

“That is your ability, yes? To make — and break — sleepers. At will. What a thing you are, Kilodovich.”

“You are Babushka,” said Alexei.

“Had you any doubt?”

“Not truly,” he said. “I wished to confirm it. For we had defeated you.”

The cloud rumbled. “You tricked me. You drove me out of sleepers by placing them all in such peril. Now we are not in sleepers.”

“It does not matter,” said Alexei. “For I am—”

Alexei took a breath. He reminded himself: he was not a KGB agent who worked for Wolfe-Jordan and had failed to protect Mrs. Kontos-Wu from gangsters. He was not a low-level sleeper who had failed to perform even rudimentary remote viewing exercises.

“I am the Destroyer.”

So without more thought, he set his attention to the world that Babushka had created: the sick, indulgent conception of the Empire of New Pokrovskoye.

“Is that the best that you can do?” demanded Babushka. She had taken on the personification of a beautiful young woman — pale, alabaster skin underneath a dark crimson hood. “It is, I take it, designed to inspire fear of rape, yes? Or perhaps to erase your own sense of inadequacy. Did you play Dungeons and Dragons in college?”

Alexei looked down at his robes — at the twitching tentacle that came out of his middle. He could see what she meant.

“I suppose,” he said. “In truth I have not given it much thought.”

“Well,” said Babushka, “how effective you must think it to be then. It must strike fear into all the metaphorical children that you undo.”

“Just as I suppose that little whore you dress yourself up as inspires lust in all the metaphorical boys and girls you seduce, hmm?”

Babushka’s metaphor pulled her cloak around her chest. They were standing in a town square underneath golden onion-domed churches. Her lips turned up in a slight smile.

“Perhaps you invoke death, you think — with that cliché of a robe, with those little glowing eyes and the hint of a pecked-clean skull.”

“I don’t think I made this up myself,” said Alexei. “I was trained by wicked men after all. But tell me — was there ever a time you looked like—” he gestured with a bony hand up and down Babushka’s slim body “—that?”

Babushka laughed. “I like my metaphor,” she said. “It pleases me to no end.”

Alexei looked around. “Yes,” he said. “You do a great deal to please yourself.

This whole place — very nice. The Empire of New Pokrovskoye?”

“It is,” she said, “an ancient empire. Ruled by a benevolent Tsarina.”

“Ah.” Alexei gestured to her. “Yourself.” Babushka nodded. “It is very — magical. Tell me — how long has the Tsarina ruled?”

“Ten thousand years,” said Babushka with obvious pride.

“And still — she is as beautiful as the day she took the throne. How does she do this?”

Babushka waggled her fingers. “Magic,” she said.

“Oh,” said Alexei, in a condescending tone. “Magic. Wonderful. Does she have a little wand?”

“No,” said Babushka. “It is innate.”

“I see.” Alexei looked around. “ It sounds like a fantasy novel. Or a fairy tale.”

“It is,” said Babushka, “very real as you can see.”

“No,” said Alexei and he squinted. “It’s not. It is a little girl’s fantasy. The sort of fantasy concocted by a little girl born into poverty under Stalin’s rule — a girl who had watched her family die and who had rarely known the taste of proper food — who was snatched from her village one day by wicked men and raised in a cave underneath the mountains to dream. Such things are not real for they exclude the grit and dirt of reality. It is all fine pastries and great halls. The poor, if they are seen at all, are rustic and grateful — all craftsmen who make fine leather or lovely dresses. Criminals are mainly dashing young rogues who only steal for the love of their Tsarina. The ones who are wicked — well. They are easily defeated. It is a great lie of a life. Is it not?”

As Alexei spoke, the towers around them began to fade and crumble. The golden light that pervaded this place began to fade, and was replaced by a relentless grey — and then darkness. Alexei could see nothing.

He let the tentacle extend. “You see,” he said, “how ridiculous your fantasy is.”

Somewhere behind him, he heard a deep chuckling then. “Oh,” said Babushka — her voice now an old woman’s, “Kilodovich. How you have miscalculated. The metaphor,” she continued, “has not been for my own benefit for many years. It is for my children. You don’t need to convince me that it’s a stupid lie.”

And with that, the darkness turned into a night sky. A night sky of perfectly paired stars — a million eyes, maybe more, looking out on vistas that were not fantastical at all: highways and offices and houses, and television screens. “See,” said Babushka. “These are just the beginning. Now that you are here.”

And to his peril, Alexei looked — and fell into the soft discourse that Babushka had crafted.

Leo Montassini was always pretty fast, and it was a good thing, because if he was any slower the baby could have taken a serious tumble down the stairs of the lighthouse when Alexei’s arms went limp and he fell to the floor.

He dropped the rifle, which by a miracle did not go off, and managed to catch the baby under his arms before he’d even touched the floor. The baby didn’t cry, which was good because Montassini was no good with crying babies, as his cousin Tina was fast to point out — but the kid sure looked worried.

“I don’t blame you,” said Leo, jostling him up and down. “Should never have gone to that fuckin’ hotel — ’scuse my language.”

The baby looked at him, frowning. Leo could feel a faint ache at the back of his jaw. He went over to check on Alexei. The guy had a pulse — Leo could feel it at his neck. But he wouldn’t move or respond.

“It is too late,” said the Koldun from his chair. “She has him. And now — now she can convert the rest of the world.”

“Convert,” said Montassini. “To what?”

“To one mind,” said the Koldun.

And at that, Leo Montassini felt a tickling at the back of his skull — and a scent in his nostrils that made him think of New York, and the strange concoction inside Fyodor Kolyokov’s tank.

“Whoa,” he said, as much to himself as anyone else, “the sea.”

The Empire of New Pokrovskoye reassembled itself as quickly as it had collapsed. It spread like a stain across thin fabric — remaking the lands of Labrador into a great rich agricultural land, the breadbasket — turning New York and Washington into the Dark Provinces; redrawing the maps, stronger than ever. For now the Babushka flew with Alexei Kilodovich. And every set of eyes he peered through now saw others, and turned them instantly. The Empire spread like an oil slick through the world from its birthplace in the north.

Stephen looked at the girl, as the sky swirled and bent overhead. Zhanna hung behind him, eyeing her with suspicion. Mrs. Kontos-Wu didn’t lower her gun, but she seemed slightly less suspicious.

The girl had greeted them at the main pier when the Zodiac came up to it. She wore her hair in faux-Rasta beads and looked only a little older than Stephen. She shouted “Hello” in Russian, and called Stephen by name. Stephen thought about that — thought about the squid that now hung still and waiting beneath the water of the harbour — and ventured a guess.

“Fyodor Kolyokov?” he said.

“That is correct,” she said in a voice that aside from its pitch sounded remarkably like Kolyokov’s. She squinted, regarding the assortment of Romanian thugs still in the Zodiac. “It is good to see you, Stephen. I take it that you did not manage to find Kilodovich.”

“A lot has changed,” said Stephen. “for one thing—”

“I died,” said Kolyokov. “I know this now. You are no doubt surprised to be talking with me here.”

Stephen shrugged.

“Not really,” he said. “You’re just like the Mystics.”

“The Mystics?” The girl’s eyebrows raised up. “You know about the Mystics. Things have changed.”

“I also know,” said Stephen, “what you did to me.”

“And what was that?”

“You — you cut me off,” said Stephen. “You buried what talent I had.”

“That is what you think I did?”

“Yes.”

“Are you looking for an apology?”

Stephen thought about that. “Yes,” he said. “I am.”

“All right,” said Kolyokov. “I apologize. But not for that.”

“For what then?”

“For this,” he said, and then he said: “Manka. Vasilissa. Baba Yaga. One three four seven.”

Beside him, Zhanna’s eyes widened.

“The code,” she said.

The blonde girl smiled. “Why else,” said Kolyokov through her, “do you think you had such a difficult time reading him? I would not leave such a device in the open.”

Stephen felt his eyes widen as a sliver of memory opened to him, and his sense of his life unspooled before him.

“You bastard,” he said. “I’m a bomb!”

Stephen Haber, a bomb. He knew as he said it, that wasn’t precisely correct. He was not, precisely, a bomb.

In addition to not precisely being a bomb, Stephen was not precisely a great many other things he thought he might be. He was not the natural child of Mr. And Mrs. Haber the sleeper agents. He had lived with them as their child, but he had another origin — another lineage. They were sleepers, true. But he slept more deeply than any of them.

Because he was that most dangerous of things: not a bomb, precisely — but for the purposes of Discourse, the great psychic computer that they all lived in, he was something worse.

He was a switch.

If the KGB’d found him, they’d have destroyed him.

Luckily for him, Fyodor Kolyokov had found him first.

He became for Kolyokov an insurance policy. If the other sleepers ever came too close — if they ever decided to attack Kolyokov, reveal him, or just send too many killers after him, he had one way out.

His switch.

As Stephen’s timer counted down, he recalled so many other things. He recalled killing the attaché in New York with a small gun — but for no other reason than Kolyokov needed him out of the way. And he recalled the New Jersey Psychic Fair: the fortune that he’d gotten from Lorelei Jones herself.

“I’m getting a sense that you feel like people use you,” she said.

“Amazing.”

“I’m not getting a sense that you are angry about that though. More—”

“Yes?”

“More grateful. Gratitude? Does that make sense?”

Stephen wasn’t sure that it did. But as he thought about it, he could see how it might. After all, Kolyokov kept him in comfortable living circumstances and didn’t make any sex demands on him. As he thought about it — yeah. Sure.

Stephen nodded.

“I’m getting — a woman,” said Lorelei. “A woman is using you.”

Well no. That wasn’t possible. But Stephen didn’t say anything — just to see where she went.

“All right. Maybe not a woman. Women. You’re a pretty young boy and women like you. But they use you.”

Stephen shook his head. The boldest of rationalization couldn’t carry that. “No women trouble,” he said.

The psychic put her hand on her forehead. “Hmm. It’s cloudy right now. Hard to see. Are you resisting? Because it doesn’t work if you’re resisting.”

“I’m not resisting.”

“Well I’m definitely getting exploitation,” she said. “Maybe not a girl at all.”

Getting warmer, thought Stephen.

“Maybe,” said the psychic, “your father?”

Stephen felt his ass clench shut. He bunched his hands. He looked past her, over to the table behind her, where a little display of cassettes was propped. “How much are those tapes?”

Later, Stephen listened to the three tapes that outlined Lorelei Jones’ Ten Steps to Psychic Oneness. They were comforting in their way. Lorelei had a way of talking that made everything seem all right — and her methodology had a certain dream logic to it that seemed to mirror Fyodor Kolyokov’s methods. At least those few methods he would share with Stephen.

Still, a part of Stephen knew that those tapes were as creaky as Jones’ ham-fisted attempts at psychic readings. They weren’t going to teach him how to dream-walk — they weren’t going to help him take control of the minds of the unwilling and bend them to his own will — they weren’t going to give him access to the real powers that he knew lay just beyond his grasp.

But they hinted at them — they promised them. And Stephen found that promise, that idea of absolute power so compelling that he couldn’t resist.

Then he thought about that power — its true exercise, in lies and deception and cruelty. Was that worth preserving in any way? When people like Babushka and Kolyokov and others exercised it with such evil in their hearts?

One of the clean things about running a giant squid was all that room. Squids had great big brains and high-bandwidth nervous systems. What they didn’t have was a complex mind. There was no need to trick a squid into giving up the controls. No need to cajole the squid into lying to itself. It just welcomed you inside, let you along for the ride, and if you wanted to take the controls — there was no problem.

It was a compelling line of thinking — made no less so than by the fact that it might have been as falsely implanted as a scripted part of his end-game. Scene Twenty-Four: Stephen Haber convinces himself of the rightness of this course, just as the countdown reaches zero.

But ultimately, Stephen thought, the choice was his own to make. He wasn’t a squid. If Fyodor Kolyokov or someone else had put a bomb inside him — the choice was his own.

“Maybe your father?”

The choice was his own.

Stephen Haber’s consciousness, wound tight as a spring for his entire lifetime now, came loose. The light of it was blinding in the consensus metaphor of New Pokrovskoye. The Imperial Palace, built of stones that were quarried by hairy and belligerent dwarves from the provinces of Motavaria, dissolved into dust. The great ramparts surrounding the harbour saturated with the sea and slid and fell and returned to the muck. To the south, the Province of Cloridorme revolted, and when the occupying Imperial Army turned out to be nonexistent, returned to its status as a township in a remote part of Canada with a surfeit of abandoned automobiles. The millions of blinking eyes that saw the empire and moved on its behalf blinked, and fluttered, and extinguished. A million hands reached over to their tape decks and compact disc players and radio stations, and with a huge, simultaneous flick, even the heartfelt rumblings of Ivan Rebroff were ended.

Quiet fell on the land like new snow.

And in the quiet, a baby wailed.

“Shh,” said Alexei. “Hush.”

Vladimir only wailed more loudly as he flailed in the straps of the carriage, the thick madhouse padding of the little blue snowsuit he was in. It was night, and freezing cold — cold enough to make everything brittle. It seemed as though Vladimir’s shrieking would be enough to shatter glass. Alexei rubbed his hands together, and noted ruefully how small they were. He peered across the icy plain in front of him: sure enough, not a quarter-kilometre distant were the low buildings of the Murmansk spy school that never was.

Alexei swore.

He was back. Back at the beginning — enmeshed in the vicious lie that had been his childhood. “This place doesn’t exist,” he said. “Right, Vladimir? All bullshit.”

Vladimir bunched his fists together and turned his wail up a notch.

Alexei turned the carriage around to face him and knelt close to the kid. He met his eye. There was still an intelligence there — the kid knew who he was, there was a spark of that. But only a spark.

“He is spectacular — is he not, my old Comrade?”

Alexei started and turned. Behind him stood an old man in a bathrobe and slippers — his hands jammed into the pockets for warmth. Whips of hair fluttered in the light Barents Sea breeze.

“Kolyokov,” said Alexei.

The old man nodded, and knelt down. He tucked a finger under Vladimir’s chin. “There, there, little petrushka. Do not mourn. Do not cry. Shhh, shh…” He turned to Alexei. “Little Vladimir is losing his mind,” he whispered. “He is losing all the connections with all the people he has met with — losing their memories, the computing power of their brains. Now—” Kolyokov patted Vladimir’s head “—soon, he will just be a baby again. In a sense, he shall be free of them.”

“Kolyokov.” Alexei looked around for a rock — something heavy to bash the old bastard’s brains in.

“Do not bother,” said Kolyokov. “It would not make things any quicker than they are to be anyway.”

“I do not want to make things quicker for you necessarily.”

Vladimir was inconsolable, so Kolyokov sat back in the snow and looked at Alexei. He didn’t say anything, but after a time, he started to smile.

“What?” said Alexei. “What?”

“I am just,” said Kolyokov, “looking at you. Cannot a grandfather admire the children?”

Alexei shook his head, as his mouth half-opened to spit some angry rejoinder. Christ! The old bastard had robbed Alexei of his childhood — of his life, his memory — had coerced him to do terrible things for no cause greater than the persistence of Kolyokov’s great spiderweb. He had sold him out, in a deal with Amar Shadak! To purchase Vladimir and his siblings — like chattel, like slaves!

“Why?” said Alexei.

“Why.” Kolyokov inflated his cheeks. “What a question. I don’t know that I can say why — but I will tell you some reasons why not. Not because I wanted to live forever as a parasite in the hindbrain of the human race. Not because I wanted to turn Vladimir and yourself and everyone else into my slaves in some elaborate crime ring to con people out of their retirement money, or a group to aid sceptical secret agents in their quest to win the intelligence war with the United States. Why don’t we go indoors?” he said, pushing himself to his feet. “It is Goddamn freezing here.”

Alexei stood up too and followed Kolyokov, pushing the carriage over sheets of ice and little drifts of snow, while Northern Lights flickered like ghosts overhead. They came upon the school quickly. Kolyokov fumbled in his bathrobe for a key, opened the large sheet metal-covered door and led the way inside.

They stepped into a large gymnasium. Alexei smiled. He remembered how it was to play floor hockey there — feel the sting of the ball as it touched his fingertips on its way to the goal, the exhilaration of his cheering classmates. The floor was scuffed birch wood, with lines taped and lacquered onto it in red and blue and white. Long banks of fluorescent light hung on chains from a high ceiling. Their footsteps echoed as they crossed the room. Alexei inhaled the scent of sweat and socks. At least it was warmer.

“Was this,” asked Kolyokov, “such a wicked lie? Truly?” He peered at Alexei, and Vladimir, and then nodded sadly. “I suppose that it was. And so the question remains. Why?”

Alexei and Vladimir looked at Kolyokov, waiting.

“It was a sick game that we played with you. With our children.” Kolyokov smiled sadly. “I cannot blame you, Vladimir, for locking me in the room with that detestable Nazi — after the things that we did to you and the others. Those for whom you are truly an able advocate.” Vladimir squirmed in his chair. “Why, then do I do this? Try to bring you here? Well — I had hoped not to die. Not just yet. I had hoped to bring you here — teach you about things that your training might not have prepared you for. Teach you how to make your way in the world of senses — before I passed into death. Make some amends. Is that very foolish?”

Alexei shook his head. “What do you want — a fucking hug?”

Vladimir coughed.

“Kolyokov,” said Vladimir, in a clear, high voice, “you are a big bastard and you deserve to be eaten.”

Kolyokov shook his head. “My child, do not waste your last words to curse a dying man.”

“My last words? I do not think so.”

“Ah but they are. You had a fine vision, boy — but unattainable. You cannot free the sleepers and the dream-walkers alike. They cannot in the end coexist. Babushka has shown you that.”

“Babushka also deserved to be eaten,” said Vladimir. “As she was.”

Kolyokov shook his head sadly. “Ah, my beautiful boy,” he said. “My greatest regret is that I will never be alive to see you, the day that your own mind grows to a portion of the many minds you occupy now. At least,” he said, “you shall have your inheritance.”

And with that, the ceiling rumbled, and cracked — and the exploding consciousness of Stephen Haber ripped through the metaphor of Alexei Kilodovich’s childhood, and tore it to dust.

He was alone — for the first time in his life. Altogether alone.

He had vague recollections of another dream. A dream in which the world of his siblings and fore-parents was unshackled. Where all could pursue their dreams and their lives according to their wishes. That world was now upon them — and the baby wailed, as their dreams and wishes all receded from him.

But that was fine. For he understood as thought faded from his mind that this had been his purpose — that as much as he used these minds, he was their creation — a manifestation of their collective will. Now, that will dissipated. And Vladimir was left on his own. A mere baby.

The baby looked down at the floor. Two men lay on it — both staring with unseeing eyes ahead of them. They had been unshackled — the baby’s face scrunched as understanding came to him and fled again, as the large mind he used dissolved — so badly unshackled that they might never return. The one he could not weep for. The other, Alexei Kilodovich…

That was someone worth mourning, from the baby’s perspective.

“There there.” A big smelly man picked him up and held him. “There. Let’s go find your mama,” he said. “I bet she’s not far.”

By the time they got to the bottom of the stairs, the kid had stopped crying. His mother, whom he no longer recognized by name, stood outside the building next to a skinny boy and a pretty blonde lady. He put out his arms and waggled his fingers. The man who carried him was being nice to him, but he still didn’t like the way he smelled so he let his mother take him away.

First, she thought:

I die.

Kolyokov’s pawn has killed me. Me! Snuffed out like a candle!

And thinking these thoughts, she despaired.

But she need not have. For what she was doing was not dying. She was drifting across and through the salinity of the world, like a sea-dense Medusa trailing her rage in poisonous tentacles beneath her in a way that reminded her of the early days — which she remembered more clearly now in the hyper-conductive medium as they called it at City 512, the place where dreamers would drown, where thought would spin away in the call of whale song, in plankton, shrimp — a rage that she dangled across the insensate few who could hear her pleas as she flew the cold night sky, a rage that motivated armies in her stead, a rage that finally drove her to isolation on the shores of the New World.

Why, she wondered, do I not die?

Green shafts of light passed through her as she spread and sighed in the sea, and for a moment, a kind of peace came over her. The peace that comes of warm bathwater, running through nostrils and filling the lungs, stilling a medicated sensorium. Rage was not all she had, in those days. For rage is not born of itself.

It is born of love.

Ah, she thought, love.

Memories drifted through her gossamer substance like drowned cruise ship passengers. Stupid Vasili; sanctimonious Fyodor; her children and grandchildren and great-grandchildren, on whom she doted, and who danced for her in death.

And so it was, holding these thoughts near to her — Babushka entered the brine of the sea, and insensate…

She began to spread.

Alexei Kilodovich looked up at the face: slim and tired and very sad. He blinked and frowned. “I am sorry,” he said to her. “I failed you.”

Her frown deepened. “Failed me?”

Alexei nodded and coughed. “I left you to the gangsters,” he said. “On that boat. I was stupid. A child hit me on the head.” He rubbed his chin, which was thick with a growth of beard. He felt cold and shaky — he had some new injuries. They were probably from being manhandled after they’d knocked him unconscious. “I thought you might be dead. You may have my resignation.”

“You—” Mrs. Kontos-Wu sat back. Alexei pushed himself up. He was lying on a rough wooden floor in the middle of a round room, with windows everywhere. “You are resigning?” she said.

“You may have my resignation,” he repeated, and then said, “Where did you get those clothes?”

“On the submarine,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu.

Alexei stared at her. “Submarine?”

“Sure,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “Don’t you remember?”

“No,” said Alexei. “I remember nothing.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu looked at him, peering close as though trying to see something he’d caught in his eye. Then she put her arms around his shoulders, and held him. Alexei thought he must have been very glad to see his employer healthy and alive after all. That was the only way he could explain the tears.