Rasputin's Bastards (62 page)

Alexei looked at him. “I apologize,” he said. “This is very rude. But once again: fuck off.”

And Alexei floated again — this time not in a void, but in the air over the world. He was flying over mountaintops — high over the red-brown hills of Afghanistan. Clouds obscured things here and there, but he could see men and machinery moving below in what looked like a mountain pass. He could see the flash of explosions, the drifting of white smoke. People scurried beneath that smoke like frightened insects. Some fell and stopped moving. He could see smaller groups of men, moving around a more remote hilltop. Near the top of that hill, an opening in the stone. When he peered into it, he saw others — these ones moving through the tunnels of a cave, like ants or termites, with a common seeming purpose. He let himself float down to see inside. To return.

He fell down the chimney and drifted through the supply chamber — where an exhausted Ming Lei sat with Wali Beg, munching on biscuits that they’d liberated from the supplies. They looked at each other warily — they smelled of each other and couldn’t, either of them, recall what had happened to make that so. Alexei slipped through the crack in the wall, until he was in the chamber where he had last encountered Amar Shadak. It was empty now, so he followed the fissure into the main chamber of the cave. There, he found Shadak — and himself. Young Alexei sat cross-legged in the sand, barely a metre from Shadak — who was curled in the dirt, his fists pressed against his forehead. The Mujahedeen that were with them stood a respectful distance away — their heads lowered, as though in prayer, their shoulders trembling as though with grief. Young Alexei was mumbling something in Russian — Amar Shadak was sobbing in no language at all. Older Alexei settled down on the sand, and leaned into the space between them — as though by so doing, he could intercept the communications that moved between the two like radio waves. It was no good. There was no Discourse for Alexei to hear. The lines had been cut.

He pushed off with his toes, and drifted out the front of the cave to the sentry point halfway up the hillside. A man sat there alone, arms wrapped around an old AK-47 and chin resting on its barrel-tip. His thumb caressed the trigger as tears welled up in his eyes.

He sat there with the man — fascinated and repelled — and watched as his thumb moved away from the gun, and he sat back as the shadows grew long and the sun began to set. Just before the sun disappeared completely over the ridges of the near horizon, Alexei spied a lone figure making its way out of the mouth of the cave. The sentry saw him too. Sobbing, he sat up and levelled the rifle — lining up the lone figure in his sights. His hand wasn’t steady, though, and he soon lost his aim. He returned to his perch, shaking his head and sobbing, while young Alexei Kilodovich made his way out of the cave and set off towards the Red Army division, in the newly silenced war zone of southern Afghanistan.

“You should pull the trigger,” said Alexei. “There I am. The agent of
your
misery. Getting away.” Young Alexei stepped down a slope, and soon disappeared from view behind a tumble of rocks. “Got away.” He made to slap the sentry across the back of his head.

To Comrade General Rodionov, Alexei was a haunting, a ghost at the back of his head. Not so here. The poor man didn’t so much as flinch. He simply sat there — and waited, for a command that apparently no one would give.

Alexei had taken this man — a gangster from Turkey — an innocent little stripper from Hong Kong — fifty others, maybe more — and he’d mind-raped them. Turned them away from their own wills, their lives, their religions. Made them into puppets.

Or half-made them. Alexei sat down on the rock beside the sentry. He leaned over to look into the man’s eyes. There was a spark there — something that was left of him. So he had not completely destroyed him.

But in a way, that was a worse thing. The part of this man that dreamed — that felt — that part was ensconced in some place not so dissimilar to the villa where Alexei had left Amar Shadak. Small and helpless and alone — while his body, his venal body, flopped and turned and marked the years, without motivating force any greater than flesh.

Beside him, the Mujahedeen guard reached into his trousers and scratched an ass-cheek. Alexei looked at him — and then across the little valley here. His younger self had emerged from the rocks again, some distance off. Scurrying like a rabbit back to his Soviet masters. Alexei pointed at him, sighting along his forefinger with one eye closed. “Pow,” he said, raising his fingertip like it was a pistol.

As Alexei lowered his finger, the sad Mujahedeen sentry faded like a ghost — the shrub behind which he hid grew and withered and fell away. Alexei kicked his feet. He found that he was suspended now, above the rock — as though he were flying.

“Ha,” he said to no one. He really, as he thought about it, couldn’t care less what happened to his body in New Pokrovskoye. He kicked higher still, watching as years etched changes over the rough Afghani landscape.

Alexei rose above an Afghanistan finally purged of the Red Army and its shadowy agents. Time passed in a breath, and he rose higher still.

Who needed a body anyway? The only thing his body was good for, Alexei realized, was spreading more torment — tearing men in two, and turning them-selves into slaves.

Here — here, was like an afterlife.

Devoid of responsibility.

Alexei spread himself across the sky, to a point where his mind was as insub-stantial as a high cloud — then he congealed himself again, and spread his arms like wings.

“Whee,” he said softly, as he drifted and swooped free at last of the shackles of his life — of memory. He flew on toward the water’s edge. And from there, he dipped into the surface — and
spread
.

Water was before him and around him, above and below — a great amniotic all. Floating in it, he could imagine drawing his thumb to his face, shutting his eyes, and letting the fine, fine mother’s food flow in through his belly button. Forgetting about his troubles in a great big womb . . .

He could imagine it, but of course that was wrong. The ocean was no mother. It didn’t, for instance, turn around one night, kill your father and try to smother you and your first true love because its piece of shit KGB operator had decided it was time to clean house.

And mothers had nothing like the giant squid. Which Stephen Haber decidedly did: sixty-or-so feet long from ass to tentacle-tip, with eyes the size of soccer balls, two tentacles and eight arms and a nervous system that seemed almost faster than light.

Oh yeah.

Stephen guided himself through the murk — jetting the cold ocean through his middle — revelling in the new sensorium. Stephen laughed and sang inside. He was flying a squid! Through the Atlantic Ocean — miles from his body. He was fucking well dream-walking!

Fuck
, he thought —
if Uzimeri could see me now
.

Of course, he couldn’t. Because Uzimeri was too busy worshipping the fucking Children and Babushka and Zhanna — making a big fucking religious experience out of everything — to go riding a giant Captain fucking Nemo squid along the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

No — you had to be running with the Mystics to do that.

They’d explained to him that the giant squid were actually among the most ideally suited organisms on the planet for dream-walking. Not particularly intelligent, they nonetheless were blessed with the largest brains of any invertebrate on Earth. The brain was mostly occupied with working a prodigious nervous system and fiendishly articulate tentacles. But the lack of much conscious thought also made plenty of room for a piggybacked consciousness.

Stephen spread his squid’s tentacles in a Mandela and spun in the dark ocean. He understood that some of the squid that formed the firmament of the Mystics were bioluminescent. When he brought this one in, he’d have to see about taking one of those out on the ocean. Maybe take it up near the surface at dusk — put on a show for some lucky cruise ship.

Maybe they’d even let him start doing the exterior maintenance that the Mystics seemed to use the squid for now.

“Hey. Kiddo. That’s enough.”

“Yeah. Up and at ’em.”

“Get out of there already.”

“We’re not kidding.”

“Yeah. Time to work.”

Stephen felt his eyes open — and the ocean vanished. In its place, a big Romanian monk — with a greying beard and piercing black eyes — leaned over him.

He was back in Petroska Station — in the bed they’d set him up in.

The monk started to twitch, as the other Mystics chimed in.

“You got to watch that, Stephen.”

“You can get addicted.”

“Hurt yourself.”

“You’ll go blind.”

“Oh stop it.”

Stephen sat up. He guessed from the changing timber of the voices that there were four Mystics inhabiting the poor Romanian right now.

“Fun for you?” asked the Romanian.

“Yeah.” Stephen rubbed his eyes. “Thanks,” he said, meaning it profoundly. Since he’d come to Petroska Station, the Mystics had been pretty indulgent allowing him to play with their squids. They seemed to think it was useful to have him do this — although he couldn’t see how. He wasn’t taking them out on maintenance detail for the station — he wasn’t engaging in reconnaissance — and his fooling around didn’t seem to have anything to do with dealing with the encroaching threat of this Babushka creature that the Mystics seemed so worried about.

“You’re welcome,” said a Mystic.

“But now it’s time to stay awake.”

“Hmm. Whatever you say.” Stephen threw his legs over the side of the bed — stood up and stretched. “How goes the war?”

The Romanian pursed his lips, nodded.

“Good.”

“Yeah. Good.”

“You just stay here.”

Stephen laughed. “What am I — a prisoner?”

The monk laughed too — on whose behalf, Stephen wasn’t sure.

It was hard to chart just how many Mystics actually inhabited this vast underwater station. He’d been here more than a day and he hadn’t yet seen one of them in the flesh. He understood now that the Morlocks weren’t Mystics at all. They were the Jacques Cousteau version of Richard at the front desk of the Emissary; sleepers who’d come down here years ago to service the structure while the Mystics went about their business — dream-walking through the waters off Cuba while hidden somewhere in their isolation tanks here at the bottom of the sea.

Somewhere.

“You didn’t answer my question,” said Stephen.

“You’ve got to stay put.”

“That’s what’s good for you.”

“Yes, because.”

The Monk looked at Stephen, his lips slowly relaxing.

“Um,” said Stephen after a moment, “because what?”

The Monk turned away from Stephen, walked across the room to a little cushioned seat.

“Because?”

“Because.”

“Big fight’s coming.”

“This one’s not your fight.”

“Stay put.”

The Monk sat down, folded his hands in his lap. His eyes focused somewhere far, past the bulkhead.

Stephen got up. He walked over to the Romanian. Snapped his fingers at first one ear, then the other, and then he waved his hand in front of the guy’s eye. Nothing.

“Because,” said Stephen. “Fine.”

He struggled to keep his voice nonchalant, but it was a trick.

Who the hell was inside the Romanian now?

Maybe no one.

He reminded Stephen of the way the Romanians got when they were guarding Zhanna and the others at the back of the submarine, but not performing complex tasks. Zhanna had said something about leaving them like that — going through their chores like automatons.

Like Richard — at the front desk of the Emissary.

Stephen looked at him. He stared back past Stephen impassively.

Stephen walked around the room. It wasn’t large by normal standards — but it was a gymnasium compared to the casket-sized chambers of the submarine. And the light was comfortable — warm and incandescent, with none of the flicker or humming that plagued Stephen in the cabin he shared with Uzimeri. There was even a ventilation grate in the ceiling, that pumped cool, fresh air. He sniffed at it.

It smelled antiseptic — and still. The fan was off.

Stephen turned to regard the Romanian again. The Romanian might as well have been dead, but for his chest, slowly rising and falling.

Stephen stared at him hard — regulated his breathing — imagined a descending scale of colour, taking him down through the spectrum. He tried to picture himself travelling through the air — into the ear of the Romanian — behind his eyes. To see himself, standing in a room near the top of an ancient Soviet sea station, trying to read a mind without the scarcest hint of talent or ability to do so.

“Shit,” said Stephen aloud. Babushka, Lena, right in front of him — and he couldn’t get a hint. Maybe if she was inside a squid . . .

Stephen sighed. What, he wondered as he stood up, walked past the insensate Romanian and pushed the hatch open, would Uzimeri say now?

The hallway outside was narrow, and the painted metal panels along it described a wide curve. Stephen picked a direction and hurried along it. He felt his pulse hammering. Shit. Babushka. The Mystics had named her as a threat — told him that she had already invaded the minds of his comrades down in the submarine and then — for all intents and purposes — disappeared.

Stephen finally stopped what seemed half-way around the circle, when he found a doorway that seemed to lead deeper into the station. He passed through it — found a room with a narrow spiral staircase going up — and followed it. He had to find the Mystics.

Stephen emerged in a large domed room — maybe thirty feet in diameter. The floor was covered in green carpet that smelled faintly of mould. Sconces in the ceiling projected swathes of light from the circle’s edges towards the middle, but not quite reaching it. The whole thing created the discomforting aspect of a giant iris over Stephen’s head.