David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

“You’re spreading.” That was one of the things that Kolyokov had warned Stephen about when it came to dream-walkers playing in the water. The medium was so huge — the salt water so perfect a conductor — that the ocean itself took on a kind of diffuse sentience. It was easy to simply dissolve in it. “Alexei,” said Stephen carefully, “stop spreading.”

“Ah. What is the point?”

“Imagine a bathyscaphe,” said Stephen.

Alexei started humming, some Russian song. Stephen swore. He was dissolving. And he didn’t have even sense enough to imagine any kind of protection, let alone a bathyscaphe. Stephen thought hard about what to do.

“Manka,” he said, “Vasilissa. Baba Yaga.”

Alexei continued humming, and Stephen wasn’t really surprised. The mnemonic was designed to wake up sleepers. And if Alexei had been a sleeper at a time in his life, that time was long-past. Alexei was a dream-walker. He was a true psychic.

“Shit shit shit shit,” said Stephen. What the fuck do you do for a real psychic ? Then he said, “Oh,” and thought: New Jersey .

Just a few weeks ago, he’d snuck away from the Emissary to go to this little psychic fair in Jersey, where he’d in addition to getting his aura red and his chakras reset, he’d picked up the tapes: Lorelei Jones’ Ten Steps to Psychic Oneness.

Stephen had listened to them just the once — and he wasn’t sure if he could remember any more than eight of them. But what the hell, he thought. Better than nothing.

“Alexei,” said Stephen, “I want you to visualize the colour red.”

Alexei kept humming, but the cadence slowed a little. So Stephen went on. “Red red red red red. Is that good? Now feel your breathing—” he cut that part short. Alexei after all wasn’t necessarily breathing right now. “Okay. Imagine orange. Orange orange orange orange. Got it? Now yellow.”

Stephen kept that up until he’d made it down the spectrum to violet, and then he said: “Now look ahead of you and you’ll see a door.”

On Lorelei Jones’ tape, that door led to a green field with butterflies and a perfect clear sky and the scent of flowers wafting through the comfortable spring air. Stephen substituted: “The door is very thick and when you open it, you step into a cramped room where you’ve got to duck your head. The room has all kinds of controls flashing here and there. The controls say how deep you can go and they flash on and off if you’re detected by anyone. And the walls of this room are very thick. They’re steel and ceramic and insulation material like asbestos but not so toxic. There are air tanks underneath your seat. And from the top of it, there’s a line of woven steel that will pull you up to the surface in a second. And—”

“All right.” The humming stopped. “Shut up. I get the idea. A bathyscaphe.”

Stephen breathed a long sigh. “So you’re back now?”

“Yes. Maybe I shouldn’t have told Vladimir to fuck off.”

“Maybe you shouldn’t have gone swimming without a buddy.”

“Well. Thank you for pulling me back. Is this one of Fyodor Kolyokov’s tricks?”

“Not exactly.”

“Well however you came about it — thank you. This looks to be a very useful vessel.”

“Metaphor.”

“Right. Well, it’s got all kinds of instruments. This scope here — it looks like some kind of a radar. It goes round and round — how does it work?”

“Um,” said Stephen, “I think you have to decide.”

“Ah. Very good. It — let’s see. It tells me where I am. Detects others. There — hah! There you are! Little tiny blip.”

“Is there anything else?” he said.

“Let me look. Hah. Yes. There are some others — not so far off in the water.

Maybe they are inside squids too? They are a ways away now so it is impossible to tell.”

“The Mystics?” said Stephen.

“Could be the Mystics. Who are they?” Alexei paused. “Ah! The ones who fled City 512!”

“That’s them.”

“Well okay good. I have to say I prefer this method to Vladimir’s.”

“What is Vladimir’s method?”

“It’s like psychiatry. You spend all your time reliving things and come out for the most part ashamed of yourself. It does have its uses, but this is cleaner. Where did you learn of it?”

Stephen was quiet for a moment. He had imagined all kinds of meetings with Kilodovich — but they all involved talking to an unimaginative thug that he had understood to be nothing more than muscle to protect Mrs. Kontos-Wu on an off-shore outing. Not some green dream-walker who he could swap ten-steps-to-power techniques with inside a giant squid.

“What,” said Stephen, “are you doing here?”

The squid went silent again. Tentacles rat-a-tat-ted across a ganglia of conduits, then extended momentarily into a deep fissure in Petroska Station’s superstructure.

“I am unravelling,” said Alexei finally.

“Do you want to do the bathyscaphe thing again?”

“No. Not unravelling that way. It is my life.”

“What?”

“I have been on a mission to unravel the lie that is my life. Understand it. Know myself.”

“Ah.” Stephen knew a lot of people who were on that sort of a mission. The psychic fair in Jersey was filled with them. They drifted from booth to booth — checking out their Kirlian auras, sitting down with psychic gypsy mind-readers; buying crystals and listening to tapes and crouching underneath pyramids — on an inwardly spiralling mission of self-discovery. Stephen had found these people maddening, incomprehensible. Here they were, on the cusp of utter transformation — grasping at a tool that could lead them literally to omnipotence — and all they could think to do with it was try and figure out why their marriage went wrong or their father was mean to them when they were six, or whether they were ever going to finally get laid.

“I feel this way too,” said Alexei. “It seems like a lot of bullshit.”

Stephen whipped a tentacle across a line of rivets. “What are you, reading my mind?”

“No, no,” said Alexei. “I can tell from your tone. You think I am some full of shit neurotic. But this thing — this unravelling thing. It has been useful.”

“That so?”

“Da. I have been doing much thinking and remembering. I’ve worked a few things out. I think I understand what my place in things is.”

“Okay,” said Stephen, “I’ll bite. What is your place in things?”

“Well, before this bathyscaphe trick,” said Kilodovich, “I have to admit that I was not sure. But here — look! It is a scope for self-understanding. And I can see it! Right here in front of me!”

“And what does it say?”

“I am the destroyer,” read Alexei, “of worlds.”

“Ow!”

Stephen felt as though he had been lashed — flung at great speed out of the brain of the squid. And at the same time, he felt as if he had been kicked.

He didn’t know about the lashing. But the kicking sensation was obvious. A Romanian was looking down at him, pulling his boot back from Stephen’s kidney. The Romanian kicked him again.

“You little fucking traitor,” he snarled — in a different voice. “What have you done with the Mystics?”

Stephen swore as he gasped breath into his lungs. “Z-Zhanna,” was all he could manage before he blacked out.

After a moment, the hag coughed and spat and rolled over, looking up at Mrs. Kontos-Wu as she climbed the ladder to the gantry. Mishka and Vanya looked down at her, then at Mrs. Kontos-Wu. Then at the old woman again.

“Why did you do that?”

“You asked for my help,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu. “You wanted to get the Babushka out of here — am I not correct?”