Rasputin's Bastards

RESURRECTION

The Rapture was beginning.

New Pokrovskoye had been building to it for weeks — its children flowing to it from the corners of the continent, in buses and trains and cars and finally boats. Welders, bankers, professors at universities; or as often, quiet and solitary men and women who slept in basement apartments and worked their days in strategically placed gas stations or convenience stores. Men who knew how to fix aircraft, or fly them. Women who bore the children of politicians and businessmen and bureaucrats. An astronaut. Three chefs. Dozens, who had fallen on hard times and lived on the streets.

Fifteen were too ill to properly travel. But when the Babushka’s call went out and entered their minds — when it tickled the tiny parts of their brains that registered smells, and pleasure, and comfort — the sick ones climbed out of their beds and made their way to the rendezvous points, along with the rest. They basked in the immediate community of family as they sat in the backs of buses, humming along with the old songs, reintegrating their memories of truth with the lies that their lives had become.

At Cloridorme, they had loaded onto the boats that were gathered for this purpose. They stood at the gunwales, holding the hands of the ones next to them like old lovers, watching as the land receded — the mists of the sea enveloped them. They hummed and sang and sniffed at their memories — at the tantalizing hope of truth, once and for all — until the coastline reappeared, and the anomaly of this place — of New Pokrovskoye — surrounded them with the unfamiliar comfort of its harbour. The sleepers gathered there in rooms and beds — doing good work in the fishery and the greenhouse during the day, humming and thinking and waiting, for the moment they might truly awaken.

It was not only sleepers that came to New Pokrovskoye for the Rapture. The call went out to all of the family, twisting in a great, expanding mist. To the more senior members — the ones who dreamed — there was no need for the crude manipulation of smell. It was a simple shout: Join in me.

Join in me. It did not, precisely, appeal to reason — but perhaps reason’s near cousin. To those who had hidden fearful as witches these many years in the darker corners of the world, alone but for their own small network of sleepers, the call offered a kind of hope that they had never allowed themselves to feel. Though they might not have known the voice of the caller by name, they knew her in their hearts. For she was their Babushka — one of the elders who had made them.

And she was something else too. Something that they all intuited was greater. For waiting as they did in dark places, feeding off the wealth of their networks, these ones all were haunted by the sense that perhaps something greater might come of them; that such abilities as they had could not simply be a mutation, a trick of the brain. The light they saw at seven thousand feet could not just be the sun. It had to be more. It had to be heaven.

Or else their life is meaningless, said Fyodor Kolyokov. Who can bear that?

Heather clutched her torn fingernail in her fist, as though pressing it back down could reunite it with the quick. She stood in the lighthouse’s aerie, looking down at the village of New Pokrovskoye. It was lit up like a carnival tonight; strings of white lights drew along its laneways like a spiderweb after a rainfall, winding and radiating out from the middle of the harbour. That fucking song was back again. But this time, it wasn’t the scratchy old recording — it was a chorus sung by a thousand voices, as they moved through the brightly lit streets to their convergence.

“Meaning is overrated,” she said — subvocalizing like he’d told her to when she spoke.

Her zombie pal laughed. I do like you, he said, in that freaky in-your-head way he had of talking. Back at the Transcendental Meditation Camp, as they stood over the array of steaming body parts that had been Hippie Pete and watched the world there begin to fade, he had warned her it would be a little strange at first, the two of them sharing one skull. She would hear him as an echo through her bones.

It was a creepy feeling. But creepy as it was, it was not half as bad as losing herself to Holden Gibson or John Kaye or whoever the fuck the old man she’d spent her life with was. She thought it might even be less creepy than taking part in this dance — this Rapture thing — that all these other loser sleepers were falling into now. It was also, she admitted, nice to be able to stay in her body without concentrating on her old Hippie Pete mantra.

“So was Holden Gibson — John Kaye — whoever. Was he coming here for meaning?”

As for him, said the zombie Kolyokov, I don’t know. The last time I saw him was more than forty years ago. At City 512 — at the place where we used to work. I wouldn’t have thought there was enough left of him to walk a straight line. We did quite a job.

“You sound proud of yourself.”

Not proud. She felt the zombie move behind her eyes, a restless foetus. Merely puzzled. We have to find out more about John Kaye. Maybe when we find Alexei, he will be able to help. Hey. What is that music?

“What?” Heather listened. She made a face. “Fuck if I know. Something about Natascha?”

I recognize it. Hum.

Heather leaned against the thick glass of the aerie. She squinted, at what she was sure was an optical illusion. The lights below seemed to be swirling — rising, as though they were attached to a great net that something high and huge was pulling out of water.

“I don’t know what help Alexei’s going to be,” said Heather, subvocalizing through gritted teeth. “Stupid bastard couldn’t even manage a clean killing.”

Ivan Rebroff.

“What?”

Ivan Rebroff. The guy singing. Hah. Trite folk songs. She would be a fan of his.

“Who would be?”

Kolyokov didn’t answer. So Heather stood there with her quiet zombie — watching the lights of the village rise up past her, and illuminate the belly of a great, dark cloud that she could have sworn had not been there a moment ago.

“What the fuck is that thing?” she said. Little flashes of lightning illuminated the cloud’s broad underside. Thunder rumbled like laughter.

It is a metaphor, said Fyodor, of Her.