David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

The giants continued to bicker, but Alexei couldn’t hear it. With a popping sensa-tion, he broke through the surface of the medium of this new place —

— and looked on lights. Like a night sky in wilderness, there were so many.

Not stars, though. They were paired — like eyes, staring down on him — across at him — from a wall of black, roiling cloud. Some were bright, some were dim, and occasionally they winked on and off — as though they were blinking.

Behind him — below him — at the surface of the liquid medium from which he’d emerged — giants conferred.

“Comrade Vostovitch. Stop playing sex games with the girl. Assemble the Mujahe-deen. Make the ready the Cistern.”

“They are on their way.”

“And Tokovsky. Bring one more along to watch Shadak. Kilodovich has other work to do.”

“This one?”

“No. Too small. The one by the truck.”

“Where?”

As Alexei watched, a great arm reached out — up — possibly down — from the sur-face of the liquid, and touched upon the wall — ceiling — floor? — where two points flashed on and off. “There,” rumbled the giant.

Curious, Alexei approached those two, climbing/crossing/falling the expanse in a heartbeat.

It was as though he put his eyes to the lenses of binoculars. But rather than see-ing a distant peak through them, he now looked upon the side of a truck. The picture turned sickeningly and was replaced by the darkness of the cave mouth. Men were moving away from him — heading deeper into the cave with boxes and weapons. Then the view shifted again, and approached the fold in the cave wall that Alexei knew led to the chimney room. If he concentrated, he could hear conversation coming through the fold. Then the view was through it, and all was dark for a time.

Alexei pulled back from the lights, and pushed away from the wall, drifting back toward the giants. He felt himself smile as the understanding dawned on him.

This, he realized, was a catalogue of City 512’s sleepers. Two points of light for all of them. He tried to count, but stopped: it seemed there were as many on this wall as there were stars in the sky. He flitted over to another set of eyes — looking down at a sheet of typewritten French — and another, that were sitting on a train, inches from the glass, watching the industrialized outskirts of some city or another drift by in the rising, or possibly setting, sun — and others, in meetings and driving automobiles and masturbating at pornography and actually making love…

Alexei laughed, and did a little cosmonaut tumble. He turned around in so doing, to face the giants. His eyes had grown accustomed to the peculiar non-light in here. The giants were floating on the odd surface, all in the same place — overlapping — like a great Shiva, a multi-armed, multipeded god-goddess. Arms would flash out, touch-ing these lights or those lights, or one of them, to reach below the water to pluck at something, or rest folded on the shared stomach.

Where in all that, wondered Alexei, in all that great collective of being, was Fyodor Kolyokov?

Where, he wondered, was Alexei?

“Where is Kilodovich?” said one of the giants as the hand came back above the water.

“There!” And before Alexei could move, one of the great arms shot forward and wrapped around his waist. “Gotten loose! Nearly escaped!”

“I told you this was dangerous, Fyodor.”

“Many tools are dangerous in untrained hands.”

Alexei twisted in the grip of the giant. As he did, he saw the star field had increased: as though the contact with the giant had expanded his vision.

For now he saw not just the brightest points, but dimmer ones too. The hand drew him along the wall, and he caught more glimpses through these: a forest, with high coniferous trees, and a large bearded man muttering something about a “mantra” to a group of attentive children while armed guards hovered conspicuously near the tree line; a woman, legs crossed, bouncing up and down on a mat (the unseen sleeper was bouncing too, making the whole thing as nauseating as a roller coaster); another bouncing view, this time looking at a man — heavyset, with a drooping handlebar moustache and receding hairline, that Alexei thought he recognized before he sped past. Then views of Moscow and the sky and a city that looked like London and other places that were but blurs of colour. What were these, wondered Alexei? Were they sleepers less accessible to these huge dreamers? Sleepers belonging to Americans, perhaps? Who was the bouncing man that he thought he’d recognized?

And what, he wondered, was that dimmest light?

It flickered in the distance — barely visible at all, like the last dying ember of a candlewick.

“There,” said a dreamer.

Alexei found himself propelled toward the two eyes. They held a view that blurred and faded in the dark cave . Of a gun barrel. Of a figure that through this filter Alexei took a moment to recognize.

It was himself — young Alexei Kilodovich — woven of strands of understanding and perception that were alien to him. The eyes, Alexei realized now, belonged to Amar Shadak.

“Inside,” said another dreamer.

“Alexei,” whispered a dreamer’s voice that was this time unmistakable: Kolyokov. “Do that which we have made you to do. Disassemble Amar Shadak. Make him ready for us.”

And then, the light faded altogether, and the grip around his middle loosened, and Alexei found himself on the ground — held only in the grip of gravity, outside a low house before mountaintops. The sky over its red clay shingles was dark, the trees growing around its cut stone foundations were bare. The house itself was made like a Roman villa. There was a stone archway at one end that led into a weed-choked plaza. Alexei stood up and headed for the villa, a purpose in his stride. He didn’t know what that purpose specifically would be: but if he could trust Fyodor Kolyokov’s words this one time, it would be the thing that they had made him for.

It was a strange and tricky villa. When Alexei stepped into the courtyard, the stones were white with snow and the pond in its centre was covered in a thin veneer of ice. The sky overhead had turned a terrible white and where the light from it struck it made a flickering, washed-out glare. Alexei retreated for the shade of the overhanging roof. In spite of the ice and the snow, Alexei found himself sweating. He heard the sound of sloshing water through another archway, and he followed it through the arch, into a narrow corridor that seemed to run the circumference of the courtyard, and then to what must have been a kitchen. Embers burned at the bottom of a great hearth at one end; the middle was dominated by a long wooden table covered in a brown canvas cloth. The cloth was stained a deep purple here and there — maybe wine, from the tipped-over jug that rocked through a twenty-degree arc in a divot at the far end of the table. Or maybe blood; at the far end, the skinned carcass of an animal — a sheep, or perhaps a goat — hung from an iron hook over an open wooden barrel. The sloshing came from inside the barrel.

Alexei crept over and looked inside. The barrel was dry. The sloshing sound continued.

Alexei rubbed his chin, and looked up at the animal. He took a finger and touched the bare muscle at its shoulder. It was cool, and although it glistened in the dim light, it was dry. It felt a bit like plastic. Maybe, thought Alexei, that was how flayed muscle feels after it’s been draining for a day. Maybe .

Alexei went over to the embers in the fire. He licked a finger and touched it to one. There was a convincing hissing sound, as the spittle boiled against his skin. There was the barest hint of pain. He nodded, scrunched his mouth. Not bad.