The Steel Tsar (22 page)

Then von Bek had stepped into the centre of the control deck and was manipulating invisible lines. His bone-white skin was emphasized by the dark shadows which shivered around him with his every movement.

“Who in the Devil’s name are you?” Djugashvili demanded, all uncertain bluster.

Von Bek smiled, made a further adjustment, and stepped from the scene. Mrs. Persson seemed puzzled. She reached out a hand and suddenly a thousand mirror images poured away from her, a thousand echoes, each as substantial as the last. I thought then that I came close to understanding something. Did each of us possess an archetype? And if so, how should we ever be reunited, each to their godhead, their Original Being, to stand again about the throne of our creator? Was there a way back for each one of us? Did this explain the hint of completeness which only just evaded me, as if one small element were lacking? Was I simultaneously, in dimension after dimension, performing this same action over and over again until I was able to make a change important enough to alter the pattern?

The
Vassarion Belinsky
continued her steady course. Djugashvili peered from the portholes, eager for a sight of the anarchist camp. He had refused to respond to what, I am sure, he regarded as his own hallucination. He rubbed at his eyes. He scratched at his exposed flesh. He moved his steel mask uncomfortably on his head and again the control deck was flooded with the stink of sulphur and lemons.

I found myself helplessly addressing the warlord. “What of your men, back there? Haven’t you abandoned them?”

“What?” He had no interest in my question. It was as if he were puzzled by it, trying to recollect the subject. “Who?”

“Your men,” I said. “They are leaderless. Shouldn’t we return and help them. The Volunteer Fleet will wipe them out!”

“Yes, yes. But I want to see Makhno’s end, not theirs!” He spoke in a reasonable whisper though his eyes were never quiet. “Where is the best view? And we should get some air. There are fumes in here. Smoke. It creates an optical distortion. You’ve noticed, of course.”

“You intend to let your followers die?”

“I am with them in spirit. Wilson’s mechanical giant leads them. It is down there now, giving them strength, giving them hope.”

“It’s a useless ikon.”

“It’s all they need. They need nothing more, Captain Bastable. Those chaps, anyway, have pretty much served their turn. They are an anachronism. You are a man of science, a modern man. You understand that those people are no longer of this age. History has no further use for them. Their attitudes hamper the advance of Scientific Socialism.”

I could feel the blood draining from my face. “You are sacrificing those men, Djugashvili! They trusted you absolutely. You gave them the rhetoric and the goals to make them fight. They will not surrender—”

“I would not expect them to—”

“They could all be killed! For what?”

Mrs. Persson interrupted. She wiped sweat from her forehead and unbuttoned her greatcoat. The heat on the control deck seemed to be increasing. I even checked the engines, fearing one might be on fire, but could see no cause for the heat. “We’re in a pretty unstable situation here, Captain Bastable. Watch your language, please!”

“But why must they die!” I knew I was being naive, but I could no longer bear this savagery, this cold-blooded sacrifice.

“For History!” he said. “As I explained. The future is yours and mine, captain. Not theirs. They will die to ensure our future!”

Mrs. Persson’s attention was on Dempsey, who had remained at his position for some minutes, staring steadily through the main observation port. She did not look at me as she spoke. “Here the idea of God has been replaced by the idea of the Future. The two notions are, admittedly, all but identical in the way in which they are self-contradictory and thus always fundamentally confusing to their worshippers, who must look to priests for translation, and so inevitably the priests (or whatever they call them) gradually take power...”

She was speaking rapidly in English. Djugashvili strode up to her and grabbed her arm. “What is this intellectual claptrap? We haven’t time for any of that. It becomes increasingly important that we demonstrate our power to the Central Government. All this foolish talk is meaningless. Soon we shall rule the world. I will reward you, never fear. You’ll be our first admiral, Captain Dempsey, a socialist hero. When the disaffected millions of the great cities rise to join us, we shall all be heroes. This demonstration will be in their name!”

Dempsey ignored him, coming back to check our instruments and murmuring to me. “Three-quarter speed, I think.”

I relayed the order and felt the ship surge against the wind.

“You will lead our airships to Petersburg. You are a fine, brave man, Captain Dempsey. You, too, Captain Bastable. You will know every honour our nation can bestow...”

Not one of us listened to any of this. It was his usual way of attempting to manipulate us. He did not understand that we had all volunteered for this flight and that we each had our own particular motives. We all knew that every word of praise could as easily turn to hatred and that as soon as we had served our turn we, too, would doubtless be “liquidated” in the name of the future.

“Thank you, sir,” said Dempsey. He looked towards Professor Marek, who sat jotting down calculations on a pad of paper. “Anything unusual, professor?”

“I don’t think so.”

We were sailing through a great sea of greyness. Grey clouds surrounded us. A little rain was spotting the observation ports and we heard it drumming on our hull. Grey light filled the bridge, increasing Dempsey’s pallor and emphasizing the unhealthy, peeling skin of Professor Marek. The ship at that moment seemed like a ship of the dead. It was as if we were already in Purgatory.

Dempsey, freshly alert, cocked his ear. “Do you hear a bit of a change in the note of the starboard engine, Mr. Bastable?”

I had heard nothing untoward, but I respected his judgment. Like any good airship captain, he was listening all the time. An airship’s running depends as much on the ears as the eyes. It’s the first thing they teach you. And so when Captain Dempsey told me to let him take the wheel, I obeyed at once. “Something wrong, Mr. Bastable. Could you go and check the nacelle?”

“Very good, Captain Dempsey.”

As I went rapidly out of the flight deck into the main companionway I found to my surprise that I had been followed by Mrs. Persson. I opened my mouth to speak but she silenced me, motioning me to continue my way amidships but to stop at the central elevator leading to the maintenance warrens amongst our helium sections. Even as we traveled upward together in the elevator, she said nothing. I drew back the double door and stepped into semi-darkness. From somewhere above me came the familiar whistling of the upper currents, the odd, organic drumming and rushing, as if we listened to the innards of some mythological flying monster. All around us the inspection tubes, silver and brass and pewter, curled like intestines, while the rays which fell between the helium sections from two great translucent skylights overhead were liver-coloured and ominous. The sections would sometimes breathe, gasping in or out as if at whim to bar our path or to facilitate it as we negotiated the semi-rigid companionways between helium sections and reached the crowns. We stood with the wide cloud all around us now, separated from the abyss by a waist-high hand-rail of oak and brass, sailing at an altitude no previous generation had ever dreamed of achieving.

The engines were invisible below us. We felt their masculine vibrations as the mighty turbines pushed the
Vassarion Belinsky
on her stately progress through the upper air. Her gaudy flags snapping in her taut, glittering yards, she was as proud a craft as ever flew— but on her way to keep a
rendez-vous
with eternal dishonour.

Una’s hair was blowing around her face like pale fire and her wonderful eyes looked steadily into mine. She smiled a little.

My mind was clouded again. I tried to grasp at small, immediate things. “How much further to Makhno’s camp?” I asked her.

In all directions, we saw the cloud oceans, rising and falling in slow harmony. I wanted only to look upon this wonder in silence, with her in my arms. Now there was a mutual feeling. I knew it. I reached towards her.

“About half-an-hour.” Her voice was impatient, urgent. “Captain Bastable—we have to disarm those bombs. We have half-an-hour—probably less—to do it. That is why we came up here. It is the one place they are reluctant to patrol—they have no air-sense, Djugashvili’s men—and there’s an emergency stairwell they don’t know about. It starts up here and goes straight down. It’s not guarded. It leads directly into the lower hold, which is now the bomb-bay.”

I was dumbstruck. My own concerns—my love for her—my need to have some explanation for the ‘ghosting’ phenomena on the flight deck—gave way to a larger hope. A hope for all of us. Had I been offered a chance to change events, to stop the proliferation of this terrible crime? Had Mrs. Persson and her fellow chrononauts devised a means of turning the progress of the world back onto some saner course? But by what alchemy did they manipulate the very tides of the multiverse? What power was theirs, save the power of their own wills?

I needed to know one more thing. “Is Dempsey play-acting?” I asked her.

A great wave of white cloud washed over the rail and swathed her to her shoulders so that for a moment only her wonderful face was visible. “I don’t know,” she said frankly. “But I must say, Mr. Bastable, I feel very uneasy about his behaviour. It’s as if he’s phasing in and out of several personalities, several options, at the same time. That’s never happened to any League member before. There are only old stories about it, in the early discoveries, when we were simply drifting into the unknown, hoping for currents and signs. So many died, fatally fractured. And Dempsey has the symptoms, I think...”

It was almost as if she had lapsed into a foreign language. I knew only the jargon of the soldier and the airshipman. The queer lingo, part science, part metaphysics, part meteorology, of the chronic philosopher-adventurers whose ranks I had been invited to join was mysterious—but learn it I must. In time I would discover that the chrononaut relies greatly upon the power of language to make some kind of ponderous progress through the unknown fractures and endless eddies of the multiverse and must learn more than twenty song-cycles in order to travel into a wide number of realms. Some vast zones will only open to a certain air, whistled lightly and purely upon the lips...

I said to her: “Madam, I believe your cause to be a just one. Your knowledge and experience in these matters being greater than mine, I ask you to put me at your service.”

She took my hand and held it. “Thank you, dear friend,” she said. I knew then that, no matter what else befell us, we should always be firm comrades. Then she was flitting like a ghost along the central walkway, her feet tapping on the crown like the ticking of a watch. “Quickly, Captain Bastable. This way.”

She stopped, leaned down and lifted up a hatch cover. It fell back with a muffled thud. “Here it is. Down we go. I’ll lead the way.”

By the time I reached the hatch and put my feet on the ladder she was almost out of sight in the murk below. It seemed that we descended forever between the creaking gas sections until we were evidently passing down into the main decks. Then at last we found ourselves in the chilly interior of the lower hold. I heard the familiar creaking of the bomb-racks and I shuddered as, through the semi-darkness, I made out their long torpedo-like shapes. Mrs. Persson played an electric torch over them. The cases were crudely made, roughly standard in size and covered in Old Slavic phrases, decorated with the same peasant designs I had seen on Cossack finery, especially their weapons. They had a quaint, old-fashioned look to them, those bombs which threatened the destruction of the entire world.

Mrs. Persson moved towards them. The creaking bays opened and closed an inch or two, letting in light, then shutting it out again. “The detonating devices are in the noses,” she said. “We have to unscrew them.” Whereupon, without any further preliminaries, she slid herself out, straddling one of the bombs. A large wrench in her right hand, she immediately began to work on the device’s nose-section. “You’ll have to help me,” she said. “Take this while I use the pliers.”

Looking down as the flaps rose and fell, I began to doubt if the racks could accept our weight. I feared the whole of the lower hold would give way and carry us and the bombs with it.

We had been working less than five minutes before we heard voices from the gallery above us. I half expected a shot to ring out and to see Djugashvili and his men with smoking pistols in their hands, but it was Dempsey. He must have suspected us, otherwise he would never have left the bridge.

“There’s no need for that!” He spoke out of the semi-darkness of the hold, his voice like the Wrath of God. “No need at all. Leave my bombs alone!”

“You’ve lost control, Captain Dempsey.” Mrs. Persson continued to work on the nose-cone. “Have you really gone crazy? This was what we agreed we should do—”

“It was your plan, Mrs. Persson, not mine.”

“It was the League’s. Surely you aren’t going to help Djugashvili kill those thousands of people? You have no clear idea of the power of these things. They could start a chain-reaction across the planet. As it is, you already know the kind of dimensional chain-reaction your original decision created...”

Dempsey drew his service revolver from its holster. “Move away,” he commanded. “Stop what you’re doing at once.”

I had never seen Mrs. Persson so evidently frightened. “Captain Dempsey! You must not do this! Get a grip on yourself! You can’t be responsible for this. Makhno—”

Defiantly, I threw my weight upon the wrench, feeling the nose-cone begin to shift. “Stop that, Bastable, or I shoot Mrs. Persson!”

This confronted me with a new dilemma. I paused, glancing from Dempsey to Mrs. Persson.

“Those bombs have to be detonated,” Dempsey said. “Nothing else will do.”