David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

“You,” he said as he sat up and dusted himself off.

Yes .

Kolyokov felt that ball-tightening anxiety all wicked men feel at one time or another in their lives — the day they enter the interview for a coveted new position, only to discover the interviewer is a former lover with whom things ended poorly; the night they come home to find their wife and mistress sipping tea together in the kitchen. And most of all on that day very near the end, when they sit alone on a vast plain beneath a cloud that could be God, and at once recognize by Her voice that not only is God a woman…

… but…

It is I .

“Shit,” said Kolyokov.

You don’t seem pleased to see me .

“Well,” said Kolyokov carefully, “I’m not really seeing you — am I?”

The cloud rumbled with deep laughter. This is me now, Fyodor. Me. No dissembling, as you put it .

Kolyokov had to think quickly; this was a worrying development, this thing above him.

“And how — how does that come to pass?” he said, smiling ingratiatingly. “The last I recall, you had… you had the fine features of a Romanov, my dear — the delicate form of—”

He was cut off by an angry thunderclap.

Spare me! I am beyond the flesh, Fyodor, and so are you! That is why I am here !

Kolyokov swallowed nervously.

Ha! You are more fearful of an old friend than you are the Creator. You truly haven’t changed .

“Am I—” Kolyokov licked his lips. “Am I facing your wrath, then?”

Far from it. I am come here to offer you a bargain .

“What bargain?”

Very simple. You are dying: your body is crumbled, and your mind only lives now in the substance of the Discourse. Before long, you will have vanished, but for your presence in the imperfect memories of others. Do you wish this for yourself ?

“Of—” Kolyokov felt himself tremble at the thought of it. “Of course not.”

Then , she said, here is your escape. Join me, Fyodor Kolyokov — in the cloud. Together we’ll live forever — in more than memory. Far more .

Kolyokov squinted up the moving walls of the vortex, to the ochre cloud ceiling, what seemed like hundreds of metres above. A glow descended from it now — like a light from Heaven. Or, thought Kolyokov ruefully, like the special effects glow they used on television when showing a flying saucer abducting FBI agents who should know better.

“Bullshit,” said Kolyokov. “I don’t know how you’ve done it, but you’ve done it. You’ve spirited the Children away from me and you’ve hidden them somewhere. You just want me out of the way so you can do what you want with them.”

The vortex tightened so close that Kolyokov had to hop quickly to avoid being pulled up in it.

You are going to die if you don’t come with me, Fyodor !

“Ha! That’s what you want me to think! You’ve constructed this metaphor most carefully, my dear! As I look around, it has all the signatures of the metaphors you’d make for us in the old days, yes? Those great romantically constructed clouds and thunderstorms were your favourite, weren’t they? All that’s missing is the Ivan Rebroff music in the background and the warm firelight, and that cheap, sweet wine you thought so highly of! Clever witch, you’ve done nothing but made a metaphor to trick me into mourning my own passing!”

Fyodor, Fyodor. Your paranoia that weakened you in the war will prove your undoing now! Accept my bargain and join me !

“My paranoia,” said Kolyokov quietly as the vortex narrowed to tug at his shoulders and whip his shoelaces against his ankles, “is what kept me alive.”

It’s not helping you now , said the cloud. And with that, she snatched Kolyokov from his feet and high into the whirling chaos of her vortex.

The feeling was not dissimilar to the course their affair had taken those many decades ago.

They had met while dreaming an interrogation. The KGB had pulled in what they believed to be an American sleeper in Berlin, and City 512 had its orders to confirm this supposition.

Kolyokov remembered the day the orders had come in. He was just a month shy of his nineteenth birthday, but had already participated in three successful operations. A regular little Hero of the Workers — although most of his involvement had been in manipulating those workers that had been implanted as sleepers: strictly internal work. Foreign espionage remained his dream.

“Your dream is about to come true, Comrade Kolyokov,” said Vasili Borovich, his titular commander, as he revealed the mission over tea that morning. The two were sitting in an office in one of the lower sub-levels of City 512 — an area baffled with the new e-generators that were supposed to keep eavesdroppers out. “We are engaged in serious work. We think that our friends in the KGB have uncovered an agent who is — I would not say our equal. But formidable.”

“Well,” said Kolyokov.

“This agent is American — he has been active in North Africa — and he’s got contacts all through Germany and Czechoslovakia.” Vasili smiled and opened the spigot on the little brass samovar, refilled his tea. “So you see? Finally, young Fyodor Kolyokov gets to see the world.”

Kolyokov laughed at that. Kolyokov was only young compared to Vasili, by the fine measure that children bring to the lay of their youth. Vasili was in fact only a year ahead of Kolyokov — and not, in truth, much more experienced. At that, he was still one of the eldest in City 512 at that time and he lorded it over the rest of them, like an upperclassman.

“So how’s this going to work?” said Kolyokov. “I’m happy as ever to serve the Party and the People — but I don’t think I’ve ever even heard of anyone doing an interrogation like this before, with a hostile mind, who might be trained.”

Vasili nodded. “It’s tricky. That’s why it won’t just be you. I’ll be working it too. And there’s one more. From Canada.”

Fyodor raised his eyebrows. “We’re working with Canadians now?”

“Idiot. No. I said from Canada . Not a Canadian. One of our operatives there.”

Fyodor set his teacup down and squirmed. He had to pee something awful — even then, he had a bladder that wouldn’t keep quiet for very long. Vasili could hear it too: you didn’t carry many secrets from each other at City 512. He let a little smirk cross his lips.

“So he’s coming all the way from Canada for this,” said Kolyokov impatiently. “It seems wasteful.”

Vasili’s smirk broadened and he laughed. “Not he, my friend — she. And yes — all the way from Canada, where she’s been—”

But Kolyokov didn’t wait for the rest. He rushed to the lavatory — where he would, in a moment, void his bladder, and scrub his hands and face to wash away the terrible premonition that stained him as Vasili spoke the words:

Not he, my friend — she .

Kolyokov’s isolation tank was shiny as a new car in those days, and it didn’t smell at all. It was situated in a room nearer the surface — insulated from the thrumming e-generators that would make dream-walking impossible, and just deep enough that the roar of the trucks and the airfield over-top didn’t likewise disturb the dreamers’ sleep. Its Soyuz urinal even worked — so the fullness of Kolyokov’s twitchy bladder was neither here nor there when it came to dream-walking.

They would be dream-walking to the subject. The location of City 512 was a secret kept from all but the most senior members of the KGB — and bringing a prisoner who could well be from America’s counterpart into City 512 would represent an insane breach in security. An old farmstead in East Germany, surrounded by black cars, was the subject’s prison. Comrades Kolyokov and Borovich would meet the Canadian operative there. Together, they would dream-walk into the American spy’s mind, in a process not dissimilar to the one they used to operate trained sleepers. But they wouldn’t operate this one’s mind. They’d crack it, and toss it like a dissident’s flat.