The Best of Electric Velocipede (46 page)

The Beasts We Want to Be

Sam J. Miller

T
wo things were wrong with the Spasskaya assessment. The first was the painting: a tiny square in a simple frame, something I barely noticed at the time, but which would go on to cause us so much suffering. The second was the woman.

Wailing greeted us when we arrived, almost at midnight. Assessment teams had to come without warning. Snow fell in great marching waves, helpless in the hands of the wind off the Moscow River. Barely three weeks old, the winter of 1924 seemed to know how desperate and hungry we were, and to be conspiring with the Western imperialists to slaughter us.

Twelve people lived in the Spasskaya mansion. Mere blocks from the Kremlin, big enough that thirty families would be moved in once we had stripped it. Our soldiers herded those twelve fat parasites into one room and encircled them while we did our work.

They had been expecting us, of course. Every aristocrat and landlord and other assorted enemy of the people could anticipate a visit from an assessment team. We came in the night, and we stole the things we could sell abroad.

Fabergé eggs and German expressionist sketches and errant Rembrandts passed through my hands; decadent filth that nonetheless could be turned into tens of thousands of rubles to feed the starving Soviet state. A watercolor by Kandinsky could buy us ten cows. The engagement ring of a century-dead empress could bring back two tractors. And these parasites, every one of them, actually believed they deserved these foul treasures bought with other men’s sweat and blood. No matter where we went in the mansion, we could hear them wailing.

*

I didn’t like it anymore, when they wept. Joy in the suffering of others was the first habit Apolek broke me of, sparing me a couple hundred hours in a Pavlov Box in the process. Class enemies saw us coming and attacked, or begged, or burst into tears, but I no longer singled them out for special brutality.

“Lenin says we need to punish the parasites,” I had said, the first day I was assigned to Apolek’s detail, when he urged restraint.

“Not with violence,” he had said. “Not with cruelty.”

Apolek was a blond and ruddy peasant, younger than me, the youngest assessment team leader in the Red Army. Soft-spoken, earnest, above human emotion. I was an illiterate bloodthirsty street urchin, the son of steel workers who starved to death in the famine of 1910. Plucked out of the orphanage by the Ministry of Human Engineering, I was reconditioned into a species of man they said was “slightly smarter than a dog but just as vicious.”

“They treated us with violence and cruelty,” I said, pouting, plotting.

“Do it if you want,” he said. “We’ll see which one of us Volkov puts in a Box.”

Back in the orphanage I’d beaten boys like him bloody on an almost daily basis, but his words were well-chosen. I’d just emerged from a Pavlov Box, suffering unending hours of electric shocks and chemical burns, pharmaceutical fumes and super-high-speed recordings, three times a day for months and months. And the mere possibility of escaping further torment was worth a try.

And Apolek was right, of course, as he would always be about everything. I didn’t understand it, how a man as savage as Commander Volkov would reward us for not being savage, but I didn’t need to understand. I just had to do what Apolek told me.

“The Soviet Union needs beasts,” he said, after that first assessment, carefully logging newly nationalized statues in the basement of the Kremlin Armoury. “It needs savage men to die in distant border skirmishes, or to torture kulaks. Is a beast what you want to be?”

“No,” I mumbled, and in that moment I saw that I didn’t want that at all.

“What do you want to be, Nikolai?”

I shrugged. I looked at Apolek, too dazed to hide the desperation on my face. I wanted him to answer my question for me.

“But not a beast,” he said.

“No.”

“We’ll work on that, then.”

I was nineteen and he was seventeen, but in that moment I gladly and wholeheartedly attached myself to him as his protégé. And while the lean and hairy Commander Volkov came sniffing around our unit several times a week, for a year and a half he never found a reason to Box me up again.

*

Our soldiers were Broken. Eight of them accompanied us on our runs, to deal with the parasites when the parasites fought back. The Broken were boys who had been left too long in the Boxes, or test subjects who snapped beneath the weight of some new regimen of flashing lights and film strips and toxic fumes and prototype medicine. They were useful for the terror they caused, and for the savage violence they would break into with the proper command from their conditioned leader. They were also useful as a constant warning to other revolutionary soldiers.

There was no more terrifying prospect, for those of us who had passed through a Pavlov Box, than the thought of being locked in one with no hope of reprieve. I dreamed of it endlessly. Probably it was programmed into all of us. Gnawing my lips open, screaming until I gagged on my own blood and puke and pounding my fists against spiked metal walls until the skin was all gone. Begging and pleading while the machines worked me over—and knowing that it would not end until my mind was completely gone.

*

I followed Apolek through the Spasskaya mansion, scuffing mud into carpet that had long ago ceased to be beautiful.

“Worthless,” he said, after walking past ten gloomy paintings of Old Testament patriarchs.

“How so?” I asked. “They look nice to me.”

“The names,” he said. “The painters are not notable. Collectors in the West will only pay for the work of famous artists.”

I never paid any attention to the signatures scrawled into the corners. Apolek probably told me that ten times before, but my Pavlov-Boxed brain has a hard time holding onto things. And a hard time concentrating, surrounded as I was by the smell of anger all the time.

No two men emerged the same from any one reconditioning regimen. People were too complex. Their own experiences conditioned them to respond to stimuli so differently.

Most reconditioned soldiers came away with “offshoots,” unanticipated consequences that could be good or bad. Crippling fears of perfectly harmless sights and sounds, or a sudden faculty for foreign languages, and so on. The social engineers spoke openly of their desire to breed men who could read minds or move objects with only thought, but so far those men only existed in rumor.

I had an offshoot. I could smell violence. I could smell anger, could feel the heat of it wash over someone, before they said a word or even acted. No other emotion had any effect on me. Most of the time it was more of a liability than a gift; standing near an angry crowd could cripple me.

Apolek was a reconditioning marvel, a specimen who emerged from the Pavlov Box with astonishing strength and willpower. That’s part of why Volkov gave him so much power so young. Apolek hinted he had conducted other missions, significantly less honorable ones, in which he had distinguished himself. “But that was the beast in me,” Apolek said, “and if we are to succeed as men we must not feed the beast.”

“I like the worthless paintings,” he said tonight. “Especially when they’re good. If they’re worthless, they’ll stay here. It’s shortsighted to sell our most beautiful art to the countries that wish us all dead.”

“Beauty can’t feed people,” I said, surprised I needed to spout Bolshevik clichés at him. “ ‘A good pair of boots is worth more to a peasant than all of Shakespeare.’ ”

“On the contrary,” Apolek said, stooping to retrieve something hidden behind a curtain, propped up on the sill of a tall window. “Beauty is as necessary as oxygen. And don’t scowl so much, Nikolai. You look like an angry black bear when you do that.”

I tried to smile, but Apolek did not see me. He held up a tiny painting, and his eyes widened.

“Jesus,” Apolek whispered, reverent as any Old Believer. I stood on tiptoe to see, but it meant nothing to me. Two human-shaped stretches of bare white skin. Tears filled his eyes and then overflowed, and I looked again, but still saw nothing.

A woman watched us from a doorway across the hall, older than us but not by much, dressed all in black. Why was she not with the others? Apolek did not see her. When he took the painting, his lips trembled. Hers went white.

*

The Broken found her, and brought the woman with the rest of her family to the camps. The Spasskaya assessment was otherwise without incident. No heroics, no bloodshed, and only a handful of art objects worth selling.

I shuffled through my weekend the way I always did: miserably, unsure even of the ground I stood on. My dreams were all of Pavlov Boxes.

Apolek told me I was lucky to even have a weekend, and I suppose he was right. Soldiers in totalitarian armies rarely get time off, especially in the bloody hunger chaos of the capitol, but Apolek actually treated his team like human beings. To me, a lowly grunt who had been told his whole life that savagery was his only strength, he gave a shocking amount of liberty. And a secretary. He took a big risk in doing all that. Apolek said he saw something in me.

My nightmares had been getting worse. This time I dreamed I was inside a Box, my whole body spasming from electric shocks, and one of them caused my jaw to slam shut with such force that I woke myself up—and found that I had shattered a tooth.

But then, Monday morning, when Apolek normally banished the darkness, I arrived at the Kremlin Armory and he was not there. This had never happened before; every other day he arrived well before me, to study books on foreign art, or keep up on the latest social engineering successes. Sometimes he slept under his desk.

No one knew the last time he was there. Not even the guards, who barracked there all weekend, remembered seeing him.

I tried to do work. I had assessment deployments to plan out, backlogged incident reports to complete and submit, all the orderly rational work that Apolek said would help me tame my inner beast. And none of it worked.

I did something I had never done before. I went down to the basement, alone, and consulted the logbook. An entry for every assessment, describing each item seized and a brief notation of the plans for it. I was proud of myself, heaving it down off the high shelf with only a glimmer of suspicion what I was chasing.

Besides the ten worthless Bible scenes, there were no paintings registered under the Spasskaya assessment.

Memory was not an important thing for a grunt, so my own reconditioning had not encouraged it. As a result my mind did not hold memories well, although my body did: weapons work, martial arts, even plumbing and mechanics came easy and stayed. Apolek had tried hard to help me reclaim my memory, by telling me things again and again. Stories. Fairy tales. Dirty jokes. Things that happened to him when he was a child. Some things had stayed. I could hear his voice in my ear, soothing and wise:

“It’s a legend. No one knows if it’s true or not. One day, an assessment officer found a painting that was simply priceless. A Leonardo thought lost, or something else that any Western museum would ransom half its collection for. Well, the assessment officer who discovered it, he told his commanding officer what he had. And the man murdered him, and erased the painting from the logbook, and fled to Paris. Remember, our superiors are no further from being beasts than we are. Some are a lot closer.”

Apolek would never have concealed a painting. If it wasn’t there, it was because someone removed it.

I did not think about it for long. Apolek would have counseled caution, but he was not there to do so. I climbed the stairs to Volkov’s office two at a time. I girded myself for a fight, prepared to barrel past guards and secretaries, but the officer sat alone in a small room with no door.

“Comrade,” he said, eyeing me suspiciously.

“Commander,” I said, saluting. “It’s Apolek, sir. He’s gone.”

Volkov frowned. “Barely noon on a Monday,” he said. “I am sure he is merely—”

“No,” I said, and stamped my foot. “He’s never late. We found something Friday night. A painting. And it’s not in the logbook. And now he’s gone. I think something terrible happened to him. I think someone—”

His face showed no surprise. Why should he be surprised? Apolek would have told him about the painting.

“That will be all, Comrade. My men will investigate. I will let you know if we find anything.”

Confronting him had been foolish, I now saw. But without saying a word, Volkov had already told me everything I needed to know. Because when I told Volkov that I knew about the painting, and about Apolek’s disappearance, the sudden whiff of anger was so strong it singed my nostrils.

The women’s reconditioning camp stank. I don’t know why I was surprised, considering how bad the men’s camp smelled. I guess I thought women worked differently. It was noisier, too, more full of anger, more likely to burst into violence. I found her easily enough. They kept the new arrivals separate for a week, to minimize the spread of infectious disease.

From the bottom drawer of Apolek’s desk, precisely where he had told me they would be in the event I ever needed them, I had stolen a stack of command forms upon which he had forged Volkov’s signature. I requested an office to myself, and demanded they bring her to me.