David Nickle - Rasputin's Bastards

“Tell me what happened to the submarine,” said Stephen.

“Ah,” said Uzimeri, “go fuck yourself. The Children will protect me.”

“Whatever.” Stephen wasn’t going to play this game. He crossed his arms and stared ahead.

“Boy,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu from across the room. “What are you doing here in the library? This is for girls only. Can’t you read?”

“Out of her fucking mind,” said Stephen under his breath.

But Uzimeri seemed to take note. He pushed himself up, shuffling his feet in the straw on the floor.

“Heh. You think you are in a library?”

“Who said that?” Mrs. Kontos-Wu’s voice sounded small and distant — and oddly frightened.

Uzimeri hunched forward — both hands falling to the straw below him to support his weight as he did so. “It seems very real, does it not?”

“I’m not talking to you.” Now Mrs. Kontos-Wu sounded more pissed than frightened. “Leave at once, or I shall call for help.”

“Hah.” Uzimeri leaned back again. A stick-like hand fell on Stephen’s shoulder. Stephen looked at him with dark-quickened eyes. He saw a thin-faced man with an eye swelled shut, and lips swollen nearly as bad grinning at him. “I was wrong about you. You are here from the Children. Not from Shadak.” With his other hand he motioned across the room. “You see? Your woman there is in their Rapture.”

“What do you mean — their Rapture?”

“Rapture. The thing that happens to so many of us, yes? When one of the Children touches you, Childhood grows before you again. You become — reminded — of the wonder of the time.” Uzimeri’s eye-and-a-half met Stephen’s, and shone. “The innocence .”

Stephen didn’t think of his childhood that way. To him, childhood was an elaborate lie that ended in flight, squalor and disease. He was constantly amazed to find out that others thought well enough of theirs to be susceptible to nostalgia.

“But of course that is only the beginning,” said Uzimeri. “Returning to childhood, it is like… drawing back to leap. The breadth of the leap is farther when one makes it so, yes?”

“I suppose.” Stephen squinted at the damaged old man and thought about that. “What do you mean by leaping?”

“ You know,” said Uzimeri. “I’ve lost the means lately but I’m no fool. You know what it is to leap. You do it in your dreams, yes?”

“Holy fuck,” said Stephen.

Unless he was mistaken — and that was not outside the realms of possibilities, Stephen had to admit — then this guy was talking about dream-walking.

And he seemed to be saying that these children — these Blessed Children — were the key to it.

No wonder Holden had wanted them so badly.

“But her now,” said Uzimeri. “She’s still drawing back. She is unready to leap, yes? Or perhaps she is like me.”

At that, Uzimeri fell forward onto his hands and knees and began to crawl across the floor to Mrs. Kontos-Wu. He clutched her face, as though he were about to kiss her. “You are, aren’t you now?”

“Hey!” Stephen followed him. He tried to pull Uzimeri away, but the rag-man held on like a lamprey.

“You are in ruins now, aren’t you?” Uzimeri’s voice was low and sharp. “This… library… is not what you remember, is it?”

“I’m sure they’re just fixing it up,” said Mrs. Kontos-Wu.

“But no one is there — isn’t that right?”

“Not — not that I can see.”

“Not at all. You are alone in your memories. They have abandoned you, yes?”

Mrs. Kontos-Wu was quiet.

“Yes?”

Stephen pulled at Uzimeri’s shoulder again, and this time it was enough. Uzimeri slumped back. “She will not listen,” he said.

“She was—” Stephen swallowed. “She was fine earlier. A day ago. She seemed right in control.”

Uzimeri nodded. “It is always possible,” he said, “to turn one’s back on enlightenment for a short while.”

“Okay,” said Stephen, “why don’t you tell me about enlightenment.”

Uzimeri went back to his spot beneath the arrow slit and settled down.

“What do you want to know?”

“I want to know,” said Stephen slowly, “how it got you.”

Uzimeri chuckled at that. “You want to know about enlightenment, boy? All right. Listen. I will testify to you.”

“Allah,” Uzimeri began, as the stars still glimmered in the arrow-slit over his head, “is a distant master. This is what I always believed. Fools keep religion alive, but the deity — neglectful. In face of catastrophe, He looks the other way.

“It has been a useful belief in my business. All my life, I have worked for men like Amar Shadak — watching their mistresses, exacting their revenges.

“If I cared for Allah’s opinions — well. The truth is that men like Shadak are Allah in their own eyes. And they do not like other gods.

“This changed for me when the Children came to see me at the pen.

“What,” said Stephen, “does a pen have to do with anything?”

“It is one of Shadak’s great secrets. There is a cove on the Black Sea. Shadak owns land all around it. He’s dug in that land — made a city like the ones dug centuries ago to south. Tunnels and chambers. All the way down to the sea. I don’t know how many centuries it will last.

“But for now, this city has become a treasury; a museum of the Twentieth Century. He has there submarines and gunboats — rooms and rooms filled with small arms and explosives; corridors lined with ammunition and uniforms and deep lockers. He has even got some plutonium and parts of a nuclear device, which we store in a room deeper than the others, awaiting the day…

“This has been my place and my work for the past ten years — keeping and building Shadak’s little arsenal.

“I think when Shadak was younger, he thought he could be a warlord. With the Soviets gone, maybe he could have a private army his own. But no. Who wants to make war with Soviets gone? Some, maybe. But not Shadak. Business is too good for war. So he does his business in Russia and Europe and America. And the armoury is a collection. Not an arsenal.

“That has been fine by me. My men and I have lived well in Shadak’s hidden city. And keeping it secret against the efforts of Shadak’s enemies has proved to be a good challenge. A diversion, yes?

“But I know now that it was never more than a diversion. Oh, how many nights did I walk the deep corridors of the armoury — sit alone in front of the banks of television screens, staring into the caverns full of rockets and firearms and explosives — and ask myself: is this what you have come to, Konstantine? Ah, I was ripe. We all were in Shadak’s armoury. It was no wonder that the Children found us there first.

“I will not forget the night that the first one came to us. For it was I, Konstantine Uzimeri, that she found first. We met on one of those nights, when I was finished with the labyrinth, and had taken myself to the cliffs overlooking the sea. I’d driven a jeep to this point, as I often did, to listen to the waves and breathe the air that was so different from that in the deep tunnels under my feet.

“And so it was that Zhanna, the first child, came to me. Although this one, I will tell you, was barely a child: Zhanna was fully grown — long black hair, eyes black as the midnight sky. Were I younger…

“But I am not younger, and not a fool either — and when a woman, no matter how beautiful, appears unannounced on Amar Shadak’s lands, I don’t think of those things.

“She appeared behind me at the cliff’s edge, so suddenly I nearly shot her. She laughed.

“‘Konstantine Uzimeri,’ she said, ‘what a dull life you lead here in this magnificent treasure-house.’