Rasputin's Bastards (66 page)

It is like
, he said,
stenography.

Yeah, Kolyokov was forthcoming sometimes, but he wasn’t always clear.
What does one have to do with the other
? Stephen wondered.

Ha. You must take notes of what you hear in Discourse. You must then separate the notes into columns — words for each speaker. It is laborious work. The younger ones are better with it and they can just listen. But for us — for me, rather — Discourse requires some concentration.

Stephen had asked a few more questions but Kolyokov was done explaining.
You would not understand
, he said, not without a hint of cruelty, then winked.
Stenography
, he repeated and Stephen had left pissed off and confused.

Now, immersed in what was presumably a vigorous round of Discourse, Stephen thought he understood what Kolyokov had meant.

He seemed to be half out of his body this time. He could feel the floor underneath his ass, his ribs still hurt. But there was a sense of dimension around him — a feeling that this tiny room and submarine had been supplanted by a great, dark hall, as though he might be sitting on the edge of a high gallery overlooking this hall; as though the hall below and above him was filled with politicians and supplicants who all spoke at once. Stephen opened his eyes, and he was back in the submarine. But he still had that sense — that maybe these walls were illusory. That the voices that still filled his thoughts were the reality. They talked and shouted and sang; they protested and justified and spun the facts to their advantage; they offered knowledgeable advice and countered it with bland truisms; all at the same time. Just listening, it was impossible to follow.

But stenography. Stephen slapped the floor around him, as though doing so would cause a pen or paper to roll out. But of course the room was bare.

Then he thought about the way that Kolyokov had worked — the way Mrs. Kontos-Wu had worked.

He thought about metaphor.

Stephen closed his eyes again. He thought about a steno pad — a Hilroy, 200-page pad bound with a spiral of silver wire, little quarter-inch-spaced blue lines on each page. He imagined a pencil — a yellow number two with a little pink nipple of an eraser on the back, and lead sharpened to a point on the front. He imagined it. And he saw it. And carefully, listening to what he could, he began to write.

NOTES ON DISCOURSE, wrote Stephen, then he listened. He thought he could make out a number of different voices, so he made columns for each of them:

ALEXEI; ZHANNA; TEENAGE BOY; PREPUBESC GIRL; BOY WITH SPCH IMPED; YOUNG BOY. STRANGE OLD WOMAN.

Then he listened some more — and wrote what he heard.

He found that as he wrote down one voice, another became clearer, and he wrote down that one too — while continuing to inscribe the first. And then he went to the third and the fourth and so on. Before long, he had the metaphorical equivalent of meeting minutes. As it came together, Stephen found himself becoming very impressed — even as he grew more and more disturbed at the implications.

At the end of it, Stephen nodded sadly. Kolyokov had been right about stenography — but he had been wrong about so very much else. When the Discourse ended and the dreamers went off to do what they had to do, Stephen read over his notes despairingly.

ALEXEI:

MY LIFE HAS BEEN A LIE AND NOW I KNOW THE TRUTH. I AM YOUR SIBLING. I AM YOUR FATHER. I CAN MAKE YOU AND I CAN DESTROY YOU. YOU NEED TO BE DESTROYED BECAUSE THE ONE YOU CALL BABUSHKA IS AIMING TO TAKE YOU OVER. SHE HAS ALREADY TAKEN OVER THE ENTIRETY OF THE SLEEPER NETWORK IN AMERICA AND IS WORKING ON EUROPE AND ASIA AS WE SPEAK. SHE HAS COME INTO THE SEA AND USED HER POWER TO DESTROY THE ONES YOU CALL THE MYSTICS. I AM THE KEY TO DESTROYING THIS. YOU ARE FOOLISH TO THINK THAT THE NETWORK CAN BE PRESERVED. HEY — WHICH ARE YOU? DAMN IT THE OLD WOMAN!

ZHANNA:

BABUSHKA IS A KNOWN THREAT AND WE WILL DEAL WITH HER. WE HOPED TO MAKE A HEAVEN IN WHICH THE SLEEPERS WHO HAD BEEN SO ILL-USED BY OUR MASTERS COULD BE SHOWN THE WAY TO FREEDOM AND PEACE. WE HAD HOPED TO RETURN THE CONTROLS OF EVERYONE TO THEMSELVES. THIS WAS VLADIMIR’S DREAM. IT IS A GOOD DREAM. WE DO NOT NEED TO DESTROY THE NETWORK. WE NEED TO PRESERVE THE NETWORK. NOT TO HAVE SLEEPERS. THAT IS NOT AS MUCH FUN AS YOU THINK, PETRA. DO NOT CALL ANYONE A BITCH, PAVEL. BLOWING UP NEW POKROVSKOYE SOLVES NOTHING. SHIT! HOW DID SHE —

TEENAGE BOY (PAVEL?):

BABUSHKA IS A BITCH. VLADIMIR IS A BABY. SLEEPERS HAVE NO USE NOW. MAY AS WELL DO AS ALEXEI SAYS. SEEMS TRUSTWORTHY TO ME. LEAVE ZHANNA ALONE. SHE IS ALL RIGHT. BAD GUYS? THAT IS SO LAME. AHH!

PREPUBESC GIRL (PETRA?):

WHY TRUST YOU ALEXEI? YOU WORKED FOR FYODOR KOLYOKOV WHO IS A BIG BASTARD. YOU SAY YOU CAN DESTROY THINGS HOW DO WE KNOW YOU WILL NOT JUST TAKE OVER FROM US AND BABUSHKA AND RUN THE SLEEPERS YOURSELF? I WANT TO HAVE SLEEPERS LIKE ZHANNA DOES. ZHANNA THINKS SHE IS SO SMART. SHE IS JUST SCARED TO BLOW UP NEW POKROVSKOYE. IS THAT WHO I THINK?

BOY WITH SPEECH IMPED:

I FINK WE SHOULD TAKE SUBMARINE TO NEW POK’OVSKOE AND B’OW UP BABUSHKA AND HER F’EINDS RIGHT NOW. ZHANNA DOES NO’ GED TO SAY WHAT WE DO. VLADIMIR THOU’ ALEXEI SHOUL’ BE WIFF US AN’ THAT’S GOOD ENOUGH FOR ME. CITY 512 GONE NOW NO GOING BACK. I WORRY ABOU’ OUR OWN SLEEPERS HERE TOO. HEY!

YOUNG BOY:

LET OUR SLEEPERS GO. THEY CAN RUN THE SUBMARINE RIGHT? THAT IS WHAT THEY ARE TRAINED TO DO. TELL UZIMERI TO TELL THEM TO TAKE US TO THE SURFACE. THEN GO TO NEW POKROVSKOYE AND DO NOT BLOW IT UP BUT SHOOT THE BAD GUYS. THEN GO HOME TO CITY 512. DOCTORS THERE WERE NICE. BABUSHKA IS THAT YOU?

STRANGE OLD WOMAN:

IT IS I MY CHILD. YOU ARE A BEAUTIFUL CHILD AND YOU SHOULD JOIN YOUR BROTHERS AND SISTERS UP TOP. I HAVE DEFEATED THE MYSTICS AND I WILL DEFEAT YOU IF YOU PERSIST. SEE HOW I TAKE CONTROL OF YOUR SLEEPERS. SEE HOW I USE THEM AGAINST YOU. SEE NOW HOW HELPLESS YOU ARE, AS I, LENA, BECOME THE TSARINA OF IMPERIAL NEW POKROVSKOYE FOR NOW AND FOREVER! BOW DOWN BEFORE ME! YOU —

WH — KILODOVICH?

Mrs. Kontos-Wu was about to step through the rear hatch to the officers’ quarters corridor and back into the machine shops when she froze, listening to the sound of a rifle bolt being drawn behind her. She spun and ducked — expecting to return fire.

But she didn’t have to. Two Romanians were standing at a doorway — the one she’d seen a Child enter a moment ago. One of the Romanians was holding an old rifle, and aiming inside.

At the Children.

Mrs. Kontos-Wu drew a breath and raised her shotgun.

Shit
, she thought.
Babushka is inside him
.

She had tried to order Mrs. Kontos-Wu to kill for her, and now that Mrs. Kontos-Wu had shaken her off, Babushka had gotten inside the Romanians.

She sighted — but stopped, when she saw the second Romanian reach around the gunman’s neck. He caught him in the Adam’s apple with his thumb. The rifle went off with a thunder and a clang, as the first fell to the ground. The Romanian looked at Mrs. Kontos-Wu and motioned for her to put the gun down and come over.

“Alexei?”

The Romanian nodded. “For a moment. There is a fight on now. You must protect the children against anyone,” he said. “Babushka is invading. Come here.”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu did as she was told. The first Romanian lay gasping for air. Alexei’s Romanian kicked him. When Mrs. Kontos-Wu was beside him, he tapped at the side of his skull.

“When I say,” he said, “do you think you can knock me out?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu thought she could.

“Good. Now,” he said, “guard the Children.”

The Romanian’s eyes went blank, and Mrs. Kontos-Wu drove her elbow into his temple. He crumpled to the floor beside his comrade, who glared up at her.

“What — ” he coughed. “What are you going to do? Suffocate this one? Like the old woman?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu looked down at him and told Babushka to fuck off. She was about to make the Romanian say something else, but didn’t get far before Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s foot connected with the side of his skull.

She peered in the room. The Babushka’s targets were curled up on the bunk beds, staring out.

She stepped inside a moment.

“What is going on?” she demanded.

“War,” they both said in unison. “We are under attack.”

Stephen looked up from his metaphorical notepad. The darkness around him was becoming brighter. For a moment, he saw himself on a great plain. A huge rolling cloud boiled overhead — a deep yellow cloud the colour of an old bruise. Stephen stood and stretched, his toes splaying across the dry, stony soil. He felt a hot wind on his face — and heard a humming, like a thousand voices — and then he saw things fly past him: a great axe and a ballpoint pen and a flurry of paper and clocks and at some point he realized that the cloud had dropped a vortex on top of him and around him, as the noise grew louder and the dust whipped around him and he felt his life strip away for a moment and a great bubble well up inside him and he felt as though he could reach out and make the world of wind and artifice dissolve with but a touch and then —

And then the metaphor of the battleground congealed once more. It was no longer a dry plain — now, it was a sea bed. And it was crowded with combatants.

Some were small — he saw Zhanna, a great bolt of silver that arched up from the ocean floor; other children whose names he couldn’t tell, the same silvery energy. And in their midst, he saw what could only have been Alexei — a huge, black-robed creature with an enormous phallus sticking out of its middle. Except it wasn’t a phallus at all — it was too high, and it was prehensile. It lashed up to the cloud, tearing long, rippling gashes in it. The cloud, meanwhile, twitched in other spots and sent tendrils down like the tips of whirlwinds.

Those tendrils snatched at the various children, infecting their silvery perfection with a kind of ink. The infection didn’t stay — Stephen could see some of them slaking it off, stepping out of it like a casing, leaving it to dissolve over the ocean — but it slowed them.

Only the thing in robes — a twisted, Freudian death figure — seemed immune. It lashed up and up, cutting gash after gash as the metaphorical sea rumbled and shook with a great screaming. A great many rents appeared in the cloud — more than could be accounted for by the single creature’s lashing. But the thing had its own defences, and sent tendrils up to lay hold of those others. They writhed and screamed in its grip.

The thing that was Kilodovich turned back then, to the smaller sparks that were the children. He waved them back. He fixed on Stephen.

RETREAT! He shrieked. AWAKEN!

— 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.”