Rasputin's Bastards

THE GAMBLER

Fyodor Kolyokov hadn’t needed the isolation tank for a long time: not since the early days when all needs Physick were safely defined by the razor-wire fences of City 512. But need and desire often mingle to the same effect, and so as soon as he found a way, Kolyokov moved the tank from Russia to America. The tank was as much a part of his life as his eyes and his lungs and his heart.

The tank was an early prototype, baffled against sound with a set of casings pressed inside one another like nested Russian dolls — dolls made of iron and steel, concrete and horsehair, ceramic and lead. Sealed inside the tiniest doll, it wasn’t hard to imagine weathering a nearby nuclear detonation.

The Cyrillic notations stamped on the outermost doll indicated expectations falling just short of that. Kolyokov had at various times tried to fill those letters with different types of cement — but the cold steel of the tank sucked moisture from the air like a thirsty whore, and Kolyokov’s attempts at camouflage crumbled within days of their application. There was no making it into anything beyond what it was: an old KGB sensory isolation tank, that to anyone but Kolyokov would stink like an open sewer.

To Kolyokov, who had first swum in its briny middle three decades ago, it merely smelled… comfortable.

For the last of those decades, the isolation tank had gathered dust in a large storage locker in New Jersey. During that time, Kolyokov never visited — not in person. But he kept a watch on it all the same and once a year, he would send a sleeper to see to matters of cleaning and maintenance in person. There would come a day, he was sure, when such things as this tank did not matter to the intelligence community and its existence would no longer need be secret.

In 1997, with the Soviet Union half a decade in the grave, Kolyokov deemed that day to have arrived.

So now, the tank occupied most of the en suite bath to Kolyokov’s rooms on the Emissary’s 19th floor. The bath had at one time contained an immense Jacuzzi tub set in pink marble. But that luxury had been sacrificed to make room, so the tank had only to share the space with a low-flow toilet and a shower stall.

The floor was a thick slab of concrete underneath the tile, but Kolyokov had wished to take no chances and so had constructed a second floor, just inches above the original. It was more of a platform, really, made to distribute the tank’s immense weight beyond its own dimensions.

The platform creaked as he placed a bare foot upon it now. Kolyokov was still groggy from shattered REM sleep, but he had to piss something fierce. The pissing, he thought, was why the dream had gone so badly. The reason that it had turned nightmare on him, and driven him awake.

This wouldn’t have happened in the old days. The tank had been fitted with an assembly from the old Soyuz spacecraft — but the pump had failed years ago.

So Kolyokov hopped on one foot and the other, bladder twisting and wringing as he moved. He splashed brine all over the bathroom’s two floors, as he made his way around the tank to the toilet. A thick stream of urine made a roar in the bowl that was deafening to Kolyokov’s silence-calmed ear.

The door to the bathroom slid open as Kolyokov was finishing. He looked over a shoulder.

It was of course Stephen — his helper, his prize, and his great secret, Stephen Haber — who had been attending in the sitting room since the operation began. When was it? Kolyokov glanced at the wall clock. Thirteen hours ago. Just thirteen hours.

“Sir? Everything all right?”

Kolyokov sneered. “If everything were all right,” he spat, “I would be still inside. I would know what was happening to my people. I would not be pissing in a toilet when there was work to be done.”

“A bad dream,” said Stephen with a little grin.

“Hah.” Kolyokov shook himself off and moved back to the open hatch of the tank. He sat down on its rim and regarded Stephen. “Have you received any word?”

Stephen frowned. “Me? Oh. You don’t mean over the phone?”

“Yes. By telephone, by fax, some e-mail. Anything?”

Stephen’s eyes widened. “Shit,” he said. “You did have a bad dream. You lost the scent, didn’t you?”

What a little shit, thought Kolyokov. That’s what a lifetime in America does for you — a couple of decades of MTV and situation comedies and rap music turns you into a smart-assed little shit like Stephen. Not even good, purebred parents make a difference.

Kolyokov had only found Stephen two years ago after looking up those parents. The two of them had been on the lam for nearly three decades, after the Weather Underground cell they’d infiltrated had broken up in ’72. His search had ended not with them — they’d died in ’91, in an unfortunate police standoff at a rented house in Michigan — but with Stephen, their only son, who had been living on the streets and turning tricks in Manhattan since he was twelve.

The parents had done their job, he supposed. Kolyokov could use Stephen and even trust him — despite the matter of his obstinate mind. But there was enough of America in him — including a dangerous amount of heroin that was easily expunged, and a percolating dose of HIV that wasn’t — to make the young man something of an annoyance; much more so, certainly, than the farm-bred boys and girls he’d worked with over the years in City 512.

“Dogs pick up a scent,” said Kolyokov. “Are you calling me a dog?”

“No,” said Stephen. “You’re not a dog. You lost the scent all the same, though.” He smirked. “Have to show me your tricks some time. Before it’s too late.”

Kolyokov ducked back into the tank. “You spend enough time sleeping,” he said. “Check the fax machine.”

Stephen came over to the hatch. He leaned on it. “Something happened,” he said. “I can see it in you. Tell me what it is. Did the ocean get you?”

“No. I know better.” Kolyokov squinted at the circle of light as he sloshed back into the brine. “I lost the Goddamn scent,” he said. “I had to piss. Don’t you ever have to piss, boy?”

Stephen shrugged, and lifted the hatch cover over the light. And it was dark again. Kolyokov took a breath of the dank air in the tank. And he began to sleep.

For someone else with Kolyokov’s problem, falling asleep would be a problem; restlessness would intervene and the night would stretch from minutes into an eternity. But as a rule, Kolyokov didn’t fall asleep. Sleep was his avocation — and the word “fall” implied a clumsiness, a lack of forethought — an amateur mistake. Kolyokov approached sleep methodically. “Red,” he whispered. “And orange and yellow. And green, and blue…”

And with the words, his eyelids fluttered shut, his breathing slowed, the spectrum flashed through his mind. The water numbed his flesh, and then all other sensation in his body was gone. There was a familiar rushing feeling, as of a body moving swiftly through a tunnel of chilled air. At the end of it, Kolyokov looked upon a brilliant, stratospheric light.

A less experienced dream-walker might have imagined himself dead — staring at the brilliance of his Creator, waiting to welcome him into the glories of the afterlife. But Kolyokov had been around long enough to tell the difference between Heaven and seven thousand feet. He rotated his gaze from the sun, and looked down through thinning clouds, at the grey-green waves of the Atlantic.

The fogbank was the last thing he’d seen before being driven out of his dream. It was still there. It had grown in fact — now it squatted on the ocean like a pus-whitened sore, miles across.

It was not a real fog, though. Kolyokov could see through a real fog, at least well enough to find his people and move in them. This one was as impervious as lead.

Kolyokov took a breath, and let himself descend to its crown. The last time he had tried to penetrate the dome, he had done so without preparation — he had underestimated its strength.

And so it had thrown him from sleep, left him bug-eyed and shaking in his tank, clenching his bladder and gasping like an old man at the top of a stairway.

This time, he would prepare himself for the descent. He would not underestimate his opponents again.

So Kolyokov began to study the fog. As he did so, he began to apprehend certain flaws in its camouflage. It was white, but it was a white too pure — it bore no shadow, even though the cloud overhead was beginning to break and yellow sun was punching through. While wisps of vapour came off the fog, as Kolyokov studied it more closely he saw that by and large the vapour clung to it, as though made from a solid dome of dry ice. He fell slowly towards it, thinking that this was what the form of the fog must in fact be: a solidified dome — solidified to beings such as himself, that is — covering an area of the Atlantic of perhaps a dozen square miles.

Kolyokov laughed to himself. An old trick, that. It was the same thing he used on the hotel; the same thing the others had used on Petroska Station, to hide when hiding was needed, all those decades ago. But this one — this was the true thing that the Party had hoped for: a dome of psychic energy that would cover Moscow, so powerful that spy satellites would be confounded by its opacity and ICBMs would bounce off its hardy surface.

This artefact was still not such an encompassing defence — as Kolyokov contemplated it, he saw a flock of sea birds disappear within its folds to the south, penetrating the fog as easily as a cloud bank. To the world of Physick, it was nothing but a blind.

But it was enough, to convince him that the trade they were arranging was a good one. And it had been more than enough to drive him from his one remaining sleeper’s mind.

Kontos-Wu had been dozing in her cabin on board the motor yacht when it began — in that semi-dreaming state when the two of them might confer directly, without the impediments of the conscious cover to intervene. As with all his sleepers, the conversation occurred in a metaphorical classroom. Kontos-Wu’s was in a boarding school that she understood to be located in Connecticut.

Kolyokov was there to discuss a crisis. Alexei Kilodovich had gone missing just a few minutes before. Kolyokov didn’t think he’d been killed — he’d have been able to tell that through other means. But the signal was lost all the same — and that was serious. Kolyokov had gone to great trouble to bring Kilodovich back into the fold. His presence in the upcoming exchange was crucial. His disappearance needed to be investigated.

Kontos-Wu sat at her little desk in the middle of the empty classroom. Outside the window, snow swirled and darkened the east coast American sky. The fluorescent tubes overhead flickered. She had a notebook in front of her and a thick pencil in her hand.

“In a moment,” said Kolyokov, standing at the front of the classroom in front of a chalkboard, “you will awaken and step out of your cabin. You will proceed first to Kilodovich’s cabin, and determine if he is there, and his state of well-being. If you are satisfied that all is well, you will return to your cabin. If you do not find him, you will search the ship. You will do so under the guise of a walk on deck to get some air. If anyone challenges you during this search, you will immediately become seasick, and vomit over the side of the ship.”

Kontos-Wu raised her hand.

“Yes?”

“Sir, what if the vomit fails to convince?” The metaphor that Kontos-Wu constructed for herself here — a plump, short-haired child — took on an expression that Kolyokov recalled from the hand-to-hand combat exercises. “May I—”

“No killing,” said Kolyokov, before she could finish. “We wish to retain Shadak’s goodwill for now. And there is the matter of your cover. You are an investor — engaged in unseemly business, with unseemly people, yes. But not a killer. If vomiting doesn’t work — maintain your cover. Which, as far as you understand, is the unvarnished truth. You are even less a liar than you are a killer. And if the truth doesn’t work — get out of there. Any way you—”

The fog had begun as a singularity, an atom of Mind, then exploded, driving him away as if it were the edge of a shockwave. It may not have been impervious to Physick; but to the probing of a dream-walker, it was solid as neutronium. Kolyokov was worried that the instruction might not have taken — but in the end, he was glad to have given instruction rather than risked dream-walking her himself. Because the fog would have made a perfect block — and had he been dream-walking her, she would have fallen.

Now — assuming she interpreted the instructions — assuming there were no completely unforeseen hitches in the coming hours — at least she had a chance.

Kolyokov skimmed across its surface, ran his hands along it as he flew. It felt rough to the touch — if the hand had been Physick, the fog would have torn awayflesh like it was the skin of a shark. As it was, Kolyokov could only maintain the contact for a few moments before he pulled away, and paused, just a few feet above the immense dome. It was unlikely, he thought, that he would find a way in from here. He sighed.

There would be no easy way.

So Kolyokov dove. Not at the dome — the impact of such a manoeuvre attempted so soon after the last one would no doubt shock his sleeping body into cardiac arrest — but at the waves that lapped about its perimeter. He slid through them as easily as did the sea birds, through the mind-fog above.

Kolyokov took a moment to orient himself in the cacophonic din of the ocean. There was too much life here — more to the point, too much life that communicated in the alpha range where Kolyokov walked. The salt water conducted the Discourse of that life like a giant single brain. A dream-walker could lose himself in such a place; fall into the rhythm of whale and squid and plankton, and let that replace his own, more disciplined cadence. The dream-walker thus ensorcelled would live and sleep and eventually die in the deep green song of the sea — unless a comrade knew where he had fallen, and had the wit and skill and inclination to come and pull him free. There were no such comrades these days, though, so Kolyokov had to rely upon himself.

Fortunately, Kolyokov also had his training, and even a little experience — once in the North Sea in 1973, and three times off Cuba, when he was helping hide the Petroska Station project. He dreamed himself a great, Mind-baffling sphere, and the din of the ocean quieted. The thing descended through the deepening green like a bathyscaphe.

“Byup,” said Kolyokov. “Byup. Byup.”

Byup was a mnemonic that Kolyokov’s masters in City 512 had impressed upon him early — an onomatopoeic metaphor for the sound that a Soviet submarine’s sonar made circa 1962. In an agent trained as Kolyokov was, the mnemonic would trigger a heightened awareness in the dream state, allowing the agent to discern details in dark or clouded conditions that would otherwise seem impenetrable.

Of course, nothing was truly impenetrable in the dream-walk — the “body” which Kolyokov occupied was a mnemonically constructed mirage of its own, and so were its eyes. At the core, Kolyokov knew he didn’t need light and visibility. Dream-walking, he could see anything he damn well wanted to.

But like the bathyscaphe buffer Kolyokov used to dive safe undersea, the sonar was a necessary metaphor for Kolyokov to access his own innate talent — without completely disconnecting himself from his own identity.

So, “Byup,” said Kolyokov again, and the mental sonar map of the sea around the cloud bank became marginally clearer.

The first thing he noted was that the cloud was a sphere and not merely a dome upon the water. No doubt it was as impenetrable underwater as it was above. He’d expected this, so was only a little pissed off. “Byup,” he said.

The ocean floor was not far below the sphere’s south pole — maybe fifty metres in parts. Kolyokov used a second and third “Byup” to determine that the sphere was no longer expanding — the distance between the two points remained the same through all three “byups.”

Metaphors like the “byup” were useful for things like that kind of work. Still, this was a part of his dream-walking Kolyokov didn’t relish. It showed just how long a time it had been since the art was practised by Italian peasants who wandered from their bodies each night armed only with metaphorical axes and spears, to fight the devils that threatened their crops. As with too much of the 20th century, it seemed that mechanization had overtaken the metaphors of dream-walking.

“Byup,” said Kolyokov. “Byup. Byu—”

He stopped abruptly, and hung silent a moment in the waters. The sonar had struck something hard — a great metal thing. “Byup.” Thirty metres long. “Byup byup.” Seventy-five metres beneath the surface. “Byup.” It was moving toward the cloud sphere. “Byup byup byup byup,” said Kolyokov, then listened as the picture assembled itself: the sleek metal form of the conning tower; the propellers churning sea water behind it; the byup-byup-byup of its own sonar, probing the Physick of the sea around it.

Kolyokov drew a breath. So, he said to himself.

So. Can this be them? Can this be how they come?

Kolyokov stopped himself. There were no more answers to be had here in his bathyscaphe, uttering “byups” into the deep ocean. There was only one place to go — one thing to do now.

Kolyokov charted the old Soviet attack submarine’s course, and set his own course to intercept it.

The cloud sphere may have been impenetrable to him — but Kolyokov passed through the concentric hulls of the submarine like the ghost that he effectively was.

He emerged into a hallway barely wide enough for two men to pass each other, narrowed to nearly a crawlspace by barnacle clusters of unidentifiable electronic equipment bolted at irregular intervals along its walls and ceiling. The lights in the corridor were dim, widely spaced, and vaguely reddish. More light came from the cathode ray tubes and blinking green and red jewel-lights attached to the equipment.

When Kolyokov allowed himself to listen, he found there was conversation everywhere. He smiled to himself as that conversation resolved itself into the Discourse — a mental shorthand that he recognized immediately from his earliest days. In City 512.

They are here — thisistheshipment! he thought triumphantly — even as another part of him wondered at Shadak’s reckless decision to use a decommissioned Soviet submarine to deliver them. It wasn’t like Shadak to take this kind of risk; the Cold War may have been over for closing onto a decade, but that didn’t mean the Americans would have switched off their satellites and ended their surveillance of the waters off their east coast. Why not use a fishing trawler? A cruise ship? A zeppelin for that matter? Even that would have been less conspicuous.

Kolyokov settled himself against the bulkhead, and listened to the Discourse. It was difficult to tell immediately what was being said — these children were, after all, the product of a much later generation than Kolyokov. Their breeding would have honed them on every level. Their training would have too — except, of course, that their training would not have progressed very far, in the ruins that were left after Rodionov’s thugs shut down the program and left them all for dead.

Given such circumstances, Kolyokov was filled with a kind of familial pride, at the speed with which the Discourse played out. Why, it proceeded so quickly that he couldn’t even tell for sure how many participants were engaged.

If only he could figure out what it was they were all saying to one another. Kolyokov pushed his pride down and listened — still feeling for all the world like a doddering retiree, trying to keep up with his toddler grandchildren during an afternoon at the beach.

Discourse would confound even a young man, of course. In its purest form, the conversation between properly attuned minds was like the chatter between computer modems — the 1s and 0s in the memory of a computer. But the computers — the processors — were minds. The talk of those minds would be nonsensical to anyone — but tremendously quick, an immensely powerful way to communicate.

The only way to access that communication — the images and thoughts and sensations that it communicated — was through a filter.

A metaphor — like the bathyscaphe. But in this matter, Kolyokov had long ago found that a simpler idea did the job.

The metaphorical pen Kolyokov had placed in his hand scratched across the metaphorical pad he had placed on his lap. He divided the page into columns. In the first column was a list of all the names he could derive from context of the Discourse. In the second column, a record of that context. So when one of the participants referred to Vladimir in the midst of a long string of images — of numbers and instrument panels and a thin-faced man in a navy blue jersey — Kolyokov would write down Vladimir. In the column next to it, he would record those images and ideas: numbers and instrument panels and the face of the man, with a kind of photographic accuracy only possible in the field of metaphor. He would do the same for Vanya and Olga and Doonya — and more numbers and ideas and faces, waiting until he had enough information to form a picture, discern the meaning of this accelerated dialect of Discourse… .

And then, abruptly, he stopped.

Next to Olga, he had written only one thing. A face that he recognized all too well. Black hair, one thick eyebrow crossing two small, squinting eyes; a wide-jawed, vaguely handsome face marred mainly by those dull eyes, the unimaginative cast of his mouth.

It was Kilodovich. Alexei Kilodovich. Kolyokov’s lost sleeper. The prize in this whole sordid exchange.

What are you doing here? he said to himself.

“What are you doing here?”

Kolyokov started at the words, and the metaphor of notebook and pen vanished. He turned, and stared wonderingly at the child who stepped through the hatchway behind him.

She was tiny — not much more than two feet tall. Her black hair was short and baby-fine, and her fingers were small and weak — an infant’s. When she walked, it was with the halting, uncertain clomping of a baby, still mastering the balance of her inner ear. She even wore a baby’s red sleeper.

God, thought Kolyokov. She was so tiny, in so many ways so like an infant… and yet not at all like one. Not with those eyes.

“Well?” said the girl.

Kolyokov drifted toward her. “Which one are you?” he asked, wonder in his voice. “Little Olga? Doonya?”

The girl stepped back from him, as though she feared his touch. “Say what you’re doing here,” she said to him.

“I have come—” Kolyokov considered, assembled his thoughts to go with his words “—I have come to take you to a very good place. Where you will have all the wonderful food you can eat, and play wonderful games all of the time. No one will be cross with you ever again.”

“Oh,” said the girl. She stopped, her back against a black box twice as tall as she. “You are Fyodor Kolyokov, yes?”

“Yes,” he said.

Kolyokov drifted closer to her still. He could see her eyes now — they were brown, but so dark a brown as to be almost black. It was a marker for them, those black eyes.

Incredible, he thought. This one must be among the youngest to come from City 512; untrained, but so very, very potent. Had she been the one who made the cloud sphere? He wondered. He wouldn’t have doubted it.

“Vladimir,” said the girl. It was the first time she spoke — all her other words had been thought. Her mouth opened wide around the word — wide as a great, red cavern, with nubs of new baby teeth sticking from the damp floor and ceiling. “Vladimir says Fyodor Kolyokov is a big bastard who I should not hesitate to eat if he is stupid enough to return.”

“Eat?”

The little girl didn’t answer. Her cavernous mouth simply closed tight around him, and the submarine — and everything else in the physical world — vanished for Fyodor Kolyokov.

The isolation tank was too well insulated for the sound of his sloshing and pounding and screaming to be heard beyond its confines. The sound baffling would quiet a bomb; it would be nothing for it to silence the death throes of a weak old man.

Desperately, he fumbled for the handle of the hatchway to let himself out. It should have been right above his head. Kolyokov’s hand grasped about for it, but at every turn, he found himself holding empty air. Although he knew it would do him no good, Kolyokov screamed again: “Get me out! Stephen! Get me out of here! It’s gone to hell! Everything’s screwed!”

Kolyokov turned himself over, lowered his knees to touch the bottom of the tank so he could at least orient himself. But his legs kept going, and when they eventually straightened there was still no bottom for even his toes to touch; only the warm brine that smelled so distinctly of Kolyokov. Swearing to himself, Kolyokov began to tread that water.

“Those bastards,” he said. “Those clever, vicious little bastards.”

He meant it as a compliment. For trapped in what he was now sure was the baby girl’s metaphorical belly, his body inert in a dark tank hundreds of miles to the west, Fyodor Kolyokov found that he wanted all the children with him, more than he ever had.