David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

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.”

“Is the war—”

“Over? Is the war over? That was your question, was it not? Well. No. A battle has happened and we are still here. But the war is not over. We are to meet. All of us. There is nowhere large enough on the submarine, so we go into Petroska Station.”

Stephen stretched. He was ferociously sore — the combination of sleeping on the decking and the beating he’d received, at the hands of — Zhanna. He pulled his arm away from her.

Zhanna merely nodded.

“I understand,” she said. “Will it help if I say I am sorry? That I was wrong — mistaken about you?”

Stephen rolled his shoulder — felt the joint crack.

Zhanna hurried beside him. “That is why I sent Kontos-Wu and the rest ahead. I wished to apologize to you. I — I told you I am no good at this.”

“When you can’t read somebody.”

Zhanna stopped for a moment and looked at her feet. She was wearing scuffed Soviet army boots. She kicked at the bulkhead with them.

“I am no good at this,” she said.

There came then another of those awkward silences between them. Stephen, who had been over the past few days subjected to belittlement, torture and open assault, now felt an odd guilt come over him — as though he were being insensitive.

He coughed.

“Why,” he said, “do we have to go to a meeting?”

“Much to discuss,” said Zhanna.

“Yes — but why not just use your dream-walking? Discourse?”

She smiled sadly, and picked up their pace.

“No more dream-walking,” she said. “No more Discourse. It is too dangerous by far. You were there for a little while. You saw how it was. Discourse could destroy us. Certainly it would destroy Vladimir, if we were to continue waging the war on that front.”

“Why would it destroy him?”

“Because of the way he’s made.”

Stephen shook his head. Vladimir — this baby with the brain of a forty-year-old — was a mystery to him.

“How,” he said slowly, “did someone young as you give birth to someone like Vladimir? A virgin birth.”

“Are you making fun?”

“I’m asking.”

“Well,” she said, “these things happen at City 512. It is an immense place, with many quiet men and women tending us. For the most part, we have controlled them. But not always. It is tiring work. You need to be asleep all the time.

“Sometimes—”

“Yes?”

“Sometimes, they act on their own. And so it was a year ago — when I awoke, in a small operating theatre. One of the sleepers there — her name is Doctor Turov, and she is our obstetrician — was preparing an injection. She said to me: ‘You are to be blessed, Zhanna.’ And that is all I remember before waking up pregnant. The sleepers were very agitated — paying unseemly attention to me. It was then that we decided it was time to leave the place of our birth.”

“And give birth to Vladimir in a flat in Odessa.”

“By that time, things had changed,” said Zhanna. “I had come to understand my son. My brother.”

“And what exactly did you come to understand? Why Vladimir?”

Zhanna thought for a moment.

“ Why Vladimir, ” she said. “What a question.”

“I’m waiting,” said Stephen. “Why did you give birth to your brother?”

“There are theories. One is that we decided to create him ourselves. Or that he was made by God. Or the spirit of Rasputin himself.”

“Right. But those are theories. Why Vladimir?”

“Well,” said Zhanna, “Uzimeri is closest to the truth.”

Stephen frowned. “Vladimir’s a God?” Zhanna looked at him. “Jesus?” he said.

“Like that,” she said. “But he is not the son of God. Do you know how Vladimir works? I mean, how it is that he can think like an adult — talk to you — summon all this power?”

“I assumed that he was just a very evolved baby.”

“Very evolved. No. Vladimir does not have a brain much better developed than anyone other baby. He’s bright, and wilful — and will one day become very clever indeed. But he thinks, and acts, by occupying a portion of the minds of all the sleepers. He makes use of them — much as Babushka hopes to, in death.”

Stephen thought about that. “Like a big computer network,” he said.

“Yes,” said Zhanna. “A big computer network — without, however, a hard drive. A means to store and back up. It lives in the living minds of the sleepers — and dies with them too. You see — if we continued the war, across what is really the collective minds of the sleepers…”

“You’d risk destroying Vladimir too.”

“Right.”

“So why—” Stephen paused to think—”why then does Vladimir want to free the sleepers?”

Zhanna smirked. “It is a two-way street for Vladimir. And for all of us.”

“What is that supposed to mean?”

“You figure it out,” she said. “I am tired of being the one to be puzzling things in this relationship.”

“Zhanna—”

“Shh. Come. We have to meet with the others.”

In a vast chamber overlooking a deep pool, the crews of Petroska Station and the submarine mingled under the flickering reddish lights, on catwalks and staircases and at the greenish water’s edge. Zhanna stood with a crowd of pale, nervous children on a platform that was raised up on hydraulics. When she spoke, she stammered and her voice cracked.

“We are at war,” said Zhanna. “Babushka, the entity that many of you worship as a Goddess — is — is a Devil. She has come to this place, Petroska Station. She has driven out the Mystics who lived here. And she has tried to steal your minds. The way she is stealing the minds of the world.

“Last night, we fought her. She is — she is weak here because of the sea. When Babushka was… er… was awakened, dreamers did not do well in the sea. It ate them up. She only learned how to swim in it a short time ago. And she is old. So we could defeat her. But — not forever. She will be back. She controls the surface and she learns quickly.”