The Steel Tsar (18 page)

“No! This is treachery! That privilege was promised to me! You wicked old bandit, Djugashvili. It was all I asked of you.”

The warlord turned from me to glare at Dempsey, his arms still outstretched. “Remember your manners, comrade!”

Mrs. Persson came to stand beside Dempsey. “Keep your promise, comrade. To me. You remember.”

Djugashvili looked at her with honest disbelief as if any woman who trusted the word of a man was no more than a proven fool.

“You’ve developed a taste for mass-murder, too, Captain Dempsey,” I said in a quiet voice.

The eyes he turned on me were no longer rational but were merry with a demon’s light, the reflection of the steel mask. “Oh, yes, Bastable. Quite a taste for it.”

Djugashvili seemed suspicious suddenly. Yet he kept to the original subject. “You will both command the ship. We must demonstrate our power to the Central Government, as we agreed. Therefore, we shall kill two eagles with one arrow and drop the first bomb on Makhno’s camp. If the bombs are only partially successful and not strong enough to threaten the Central Government, we simply tell them we destroyed the rebels. We then make an alliance with them until we have perfected the bombs.”

Professor Marek seemed offended at that. “There is nothing wrong with my bombs, sir! Everything will proceed as it should.”

Djugashvili lifted a celebratory beaker. “Then let us drink to the total elimination of all who oppose us,” he said.

“What a splendid idea,” said Mrs. Persson.

Disbelievingly I looked around me for the source of an almost overpowering scent of roses.

* * *

W
e were forced to stay at the table while Djugashvili continued his monologues, mocking us for the weaklings he believed us to be, who scrupled too much to be able to kill him, who would obey him helplessly even when we knew he would eventually dispose of us, probably violently.

We were all involved in our own thoughts as we considered the future. I wondered if Dempsey and Mrs. Persson played their roles according to some agreed plan, or if they already improvised. Dempsey’s anger had certainly seemed thoroughly genuine.

We let Djugashvili rave himself into incoherence until at last, without a word, he lumbered from the room, all unchecked ego and ruthless power, grunting for his servants.

“He’s right, you know.”

It was Peewee Wilson, his eyes bright as stones, deep in conversation with Professor Marek.

I was deeply weary but completely incapable of sleep. As I glanced towards our technological experts I saw a figure behind them in the shadows. He was a tall, gaunt man and his features were familiar. How had he come here? Mrs. Persson did not seem at all surprised.

“Von Bek,” she said. “Thank God.”

Events were becoming increasingly fragmented and dreamlike and I wondered if we were not at that moment actually closer to the true nature of the multiverse. I also detected a hint of another kind of reasoning that better explained the actuality of our bizarre experience.

Von Bek was not the same anarchist nobleman I had originally met in my first adventure as a nomad of time, but I observed a strong family resemblance. Mrs. Persson introduced him as Max von Bek.

Von Bek was swathed in a long leather military coat. Beneath this was perfect evening dress. It looked as if he had completed his toilet only moments before. He spoke in a soft, drawling voice, slightly accented, and smoked small, brown cigarettes which gave off a sweet, almost herbal odour. The most remarkable thing about him was that he was a full albino, with crimson eyes and fine, aristocratic features. As he moved into the light this dramatic creature looked as if he had stepped from the pages of a glorious melodrama. “I am known in these parts as Monsieur Zenith,” he said. “Here, a title and an old name are rather inconvenient.” He held out his elegant hand and I shook it. “How do you do, Captain Bastable. There is some talk, I hear, of your joining us.”

I did not follow him. A questioning look at Mrs. Persson caused her to smile. “We are already a little unsynchronized, Max. We’re at present keeping some sort of course. We had a bulge in two sectors and almost lost a whole stability-zone, which we can’t afford.”

Her words were pretty much meaningless to me, but clearly Monsieur Zenith/von Bek knew what she was talking about. He listened soberly. Then he turned to me. “We think you’ll want to join the League,” he said. “In my view there is no better alternative for a gentleman faced with the stark evidence of the infinite multiverse, but you will be allowed eventually to decide for yourself.”

I wondered what Peewee and Professor Marek were making of this conversation. When I looked at them I saw they were apparently frozen. I had an uneasy feeling. Had Monsieur Zenith actually arrested the flow of Time? I suppose he was amused by my expression.

“Time proceeds at many speeds and along many courses,” he said. “There is the slow time of the trees and the brisk time of the mayfly, yet both perceive the flow from their own subjective viewpoint. Your companions are currently experiencing mineral time, you might say, and merely appear to be completely still. Only a few of us, I must admit, have the necessary sorcery, as you might put it, to play these little tricks with Time.” His manner changed suddenly and became very serious.

“We have no choice but to proceed with our original strategy if we are to save the maximum lives. We require a certain number of participants to play out the next stages of this game. If we lose, captain, there will be disastrous consequences for the human race and there is every chance that this sector will drag down all the rest. There is, in spite of what you might have feared, cause and effect in the multiverse and one sector can easily influence another. If we win, we shall perhaps do little more than preserve the
status quo.
Frequently it is all we can hope to achieve.”

There was something in this foreign nobleman’s manner, some authority about his vibrant voice and strange red eyes, that made me want to join my fate to his. Already I was prepared to serve in Mrs. Persson’s cause, and if her cause were Monsieur Zenith’s, so much the better.

For a second time I offered him my hand. “You can rely on me, sir,” I said. “If Mrs. Persson vouches for you, I am at your service.”

“Good man,” said von Bek in resonant approval. “I am going to ask rather a lot of you, captain. I want you to play a part. In one sense it should be an easy one, for you must play yourself— but yourself before you grew aware of what you might call discrepancies in the fabric of Time. Am I making myself clear?”

“I think so, sir. In other words, you want me to go along with events just as if I didn’t know any part of their outcome. I must follow my emotions, let Djugashvili and the others remain confident of their unchecked power...”

“Excellent.” Von Bek nodded to Mrs. Persson. “You were spot on about this chap. He’s the right stuff.”

I flushed with embarrassment and pointed out that I was nothing but a simple British soldier doing his job as best he could in the service of the best cause he could find. “It’s only what the Bastables have always done, sir.”

“Then now you must do what the Bastables have always done and do it to the greatest of your ability,” he said.

“I’m not happy with this tampering.” Dempsey had revived himself. “What good will it do in the end?” He was still drunk and he looked at me almost jealously, I thought. He was a thoroughly wounded soul.

“You know better than I, old man,” I said. “I’m pretty new to this sort of thing. You’ll have to give me the appropriate advice.”

“Don’t patronize me, Bastable!” He turned away with a shrug. “I’ll help you. I’ll help us all. And God help me.” It was as if he were, as an actor, completely immersed again in his role. It occurred to me that members of this League were not always conscious of their situation, not always aware of any other existence, that a kind of saving amnesia affected them, allowing them to play out their parts with perhaps a little less anguish or, at least, uncertainty.

Von Bek offered me a sympathetic smile. “There’s precious little personal reward in this work, old man. You have to be a bit of an idealist to do it.”

“Then it’s the job for me,” I said.

He offered me a military salute, tipped an imaginary hat to Mrs. Persson, and returned to the shadows as Peewee said in offended tones, “I don’t have to talk to you!”

Cornelius Dempsey chuckled and sat down next to Wilson, pretending a deep interest in what he was saying.

“You think we’ll be able to blow poor old Makhno to smithereens, do you?” The drunkard was unmoved by Wilson’s unwelcoming words.

“One bomb should leave a crater the size of the Grand Canyon,” said Wilson in satisfaction. “We’ll soon bring the world to her senses, old man. You’ll see.”

Dempsey’s response was to place his head on his arms and return to snoring oblivion.

Mrs. Persson asked me if I would help get the man to bed. When we had laid him out on his bunk and left him as comfortable as possible we sat together drinking coffee in the tiny parlour. It was a pleasant house, full of painted fretwork and warm fabrics, and I wondered what
kulak
family had been killed or evicted in order to provide us with so much comparative luxury.

“Poor Dempsey’s half-mad,” said Una Persson, “and not always the most reliable ally. His judgment was destroyed and it’s taken him ages to get to where he is now. For a long time he managed to keep himself going on a mixture of guilt and cynicism. A familiar enough combination. But now he sees an opportunity to put something right.”

“How can we both bear responsibility for the destruction of Hiroshima?” I asked, hoping she would not warn me off the subject and make me return to my role. Some peculiar alchemy was already taking place, however, and my encounters of the last few hours had assumed the quality of a vividly recollected dream.

“Because we are all, in a sense, responsible for such great evils,” she said. “Perhaps every individual member of the human race has had the experience you and Dempsey share. But that still does not remove your responsibility or mine. It is, however, a shared responsibility. We must all monitor our own actions. Our own actions can lead to something like Hiroshima, to the rise of Djugashvili. It is why we must be forever vigilant, forever attempting to adjust the Cosmic Balance. Every one of us should aspire, I think, to join the Just. That aspiration alone has a certain value.”

I changed the subject. “I suspect you, Mrs. Persson, of engineering much of this, especially my encounter with Dempsey. This meeting of so many people connected with the first bomb— does it have something to do with your attempts to minimize the consequences of that event?”

“Time,” she said, “will tell.”

“At least tell me how Dempsey dropped a nuclear fission bomb on Japan.”

“Similar circumstances to your own, Captain Bastable.” She sipped her coffee. She looked exhausted and I felt that I was keeping her up, but she continued. “He’s a socialist. He became idealistically involved with Chinese nationalists trying to get foreigners out of their country. At that time Professor Marek was also working for the Chinese socialists. They were the only people desperate enough to believe that he could develop such a bomb. Other countries are working on the idea, of course, including the refining of uranium. That is what was going on in Yekaterinaslav. Like you, they had no idea of the power of the crude bomb they made. They intended to drop it on the airship yards—”

“This is too much!” I apologized for asking the question. “It is madness. It isn’t possible.” But I was by now convinced that it was all too possible for events to be experienced like echoes, over and over again, through all the layers of the multiverse, through all the flowing seas of Time and an infinity of material forms perpetually reproducing themselves.

Suddenly that scene aboard the
Loch Etive
came back to me. I recalled the faces of that other von Bek, of O. T. Shaw, of Mrs. Persson. A coldness filled me as I remembered the awful, blinding light rising to engulf us, my realization of the appalling crime we had committed. A crime, I had thought, without the possibility of redemption or restitution.

“They dropped it on Hiroshima,” she said remorselessly. It was as if she was tempering me like a sword. Her words were hammer blows on the iron of my soul. “That’s what started the war, as you know. It destroyed the entire city. Dempsey’s vessel was his own. He’d put all his savings into buying it and going off to join the Chinese. It had a London registration. Of course, the ship had been sighted and the wreckage was easily identified—it had fused, part of it, into one solid sculpture. It was more than the Japanese needed. If there had not been a delay in the detonation, of course, nothing of the ship would have survived. Dempsey got out. As far as he knew he was the only one. The Japanese had wanted an excuse to go to War and now they had a moral crusade to boot. Everyone was preparing for War, anyway. The Japanese destroyed some British merchant ships. They didn’t care. They were willing at that stage to destroy anything with a Union Jack on it and it’s difficult to blame them. Well, of course, the British then declared War and the whole thing boiled over into the present mess. Dempsey was picked up by a Javanese freighter at first and only later did it dawn on him what he had done—what, indeed, he’d started. Poor devil.”

I reflected that the Japanese had behaved rather well under the circumstances. “I know what it is to live with the deaths of millions on my conscience,” I said.

Mrs. Persson gestured almost impatiently. “Oh, so do I, Captain Bastable. So do I.”

I was deceived by the lightness of her tone. “It’s a heavy burden for me.”

“It’s a shared burden, however,” she said. “That was my point.”

I was grateful for this comfort. Again my thoughts returned to the notion that Dempsey and I were shouldering the guilt for the same crime. Millions like us, perhaps, were also feeling what we felt. I groaned.

“You were both catalysts,” Mrs. Persson told me, “no more than that. Do you still not realize your error? No individual can claim so much personal guilt. It is madness to do so. We are
all
guilty of supporting the circumstances, the self-deceptions, the misconceptions and misinformation which lead to War. Every lie we tell ourselves brings an evil like the destruction of Hiroshima closer. We drown in our lies. Hiroshima has indeed been destroyed in more than one world by more than one man, over and over again. The situations vary, but the people die just the same and in the same way. Some men feel they carry the whole weight of the crime. But we are all victims, Captain Bastable, just as in other ways we are all aggressors. At root we are victims to the comforting lies we tell ourselves, of our willingness to shift moral responsibility onto leaders, organized religion—onto a deity or a race, if all else fails. Onto God, onto politicians, onto creatures from other planets. It is always the same impulse, to refuse responsibility. If we do not take responsibility for our own actions, ultimately we perish.”