Transreal Cyberpunk Read online

  Our eyes were caught by the drying-racks over the fire. Mushrooms littered the racks, the red-capped fly agaric mushrooms that one always sees in children’s books. The intoxicating toadstools of the Siberian nomad. Their steaming fungal reek filled the tent, below the acrid stench of smoke and rancid sweat.

  “Muk-a-moor,” said Jif Gurd, pointing at them, and then at his head.

  “Oh, Christ,” Vlad said. “He won’t show us anything unless we eat his sacred mushrooms.” He caught the geezer’s eye and pantomimed eating.

  The old addict shook his head and held up a leather cup. He pretended to drink, then smacked his rubbery, bearded lips. He pointed to Balan Thok.

  “I don’t get it,” Vlad said.

  “Right,” I said, getting to my feet. “Well, you hold him here, and I’ll go back to camp. I’ll have the soldiers in by midnight. We’ll beat the truth out of the old dog-butcher.”

  “Sit down, idiot,” Vlad hissed. “Don’t you remember how quick he was with that knife?”

  It was true. At my movement a sinister gleam had entered the old man’s eyes. I sat down quickly. “We can outrun him.”

  “It’s getting dark,” Vlad said. Just three words, but they brought a whole scene into mind: running blind through a maze of broken branches, with a drug-crazed, panting slasher at my heels ... I smiled winningly at the old shaman. He grinned back and again made his drinking gesture. He tossed the leather cup to Balan Thok, who grabbed at it wildly and missed it by two meters. She picked it up and turned her back on us. We heard her fumble with the lacing of her trousers. She squatted down. There was a hiss of liquid.

  “Oh Jesus,” I said. “Vlad, no.”

  “I’ve heard about this,” Vlad said wonderingly. “The active ingredient passes on into the urine. Ten savages can get drunk on one mushroom. Pass it from man to man.” He paused. “The kidneys absorb the impurities. It’s supposed to be better for you that way. Not as poisonous.”

  “Can’t we just eat the muk-a-moors?” I said, pointing at the rack. The old shaman glowered at me, and shook his head violently. Balan Thok sashayed toward me, hiding her face behind one sleeve. She put the warm cup into my hands and backed away, giggling.

  I held the cup. A terrible fatalism washed over me. “Vladimir,” I said. “I’m tired. My head hurts. I’ve been stung all over by mosquitoes and my pants are drenched with dog blood. I don’t want to drink the poison piss of some savage—”

  “It’s for Science,” Vlad said soberly.

  “All my life,” I began, “I wanted to work for the good of Society. My dear mother, God bless her memory ...” I choked up. “If she could see what her dear son has come to ... All those years of training, just for this! For this, Vlad?” I began trembling violently.

  “Don’t spill it!” Vlad said. Balan Thok stared at me, licking her lips. “I think she likes you,” Vlad said.

  For some weird reason these last words pushed me over the edge. I shoved the cup to my lips and drained the potion in one go. It sizzled down my gullet in a wave of hot nausea. Somehow I managed to keep from vomiting.

  “How do you feel?” Vlad asked eagerly.

  “My face is going numb.” I stared at Balan Thok. Her eyes were full of hot fascination. I looked at her, willing her to come toward me. Nothing could be worse now. I had gone through the ultimate. I was ready, no, eager, to heap any degradation on myself. Maybe fornication with this degraded creature would raise me to some strange height.

  “You’re braver than I thought, Nikita,” Vlad said. His voice rang with unnatural volume in my drugged ears. He pulled the cup from my numbed hands. “Considered objectively, this is really not so bad. A healthy young woman ... sterile fluid ... It’s mere custom that makes it seem so repellent.” He smiled in superior fashion, gripping the cup.

  Suddenly the old Siberian shaman stood before him guffawing crazily as he donated Vlad’s share. A cheesy reek came from his dropped trousers. Vlad stared at me in horror. I fell on my side, laughing wildly. My bones turned to rubber.

  The girl laughed like a xylophone, gesturing to me lewdly. Vlad was puking noisily. I got up to lurch toward the girl, but forgot to move my feet and fell down. My head was inflamed with intense desire for her. She was turning round and round, singing in a high voice, holding a curved knife over her head. Somehow I tackled her and we fell headlong onto one of the Evenk sleeping bags, crushing it with a snapping of wood and lashings. I couldn’t get out of my clothes. They were crawling over me like live things.

  I paused to retch, not feeling much pain, just a torrent of sensations as the drug came up. Vlad and the old man were singing together loudly and at great length. I was thumping around vaguely on top of the girl, watching a louse crawl through one of her braids.

  The old man came crawling up on all fours and stared into my face. “Thunder-God,” he cackled, and tugged at my arm. He had pulled aside a large reindeer skin that covered the floor of the yurt. There was a deep hole, right there, right in the tent with us. Fighting the cramps in my stomach, I dragged myself toward it and peered in.

  The space in the hole was strangely distorted; it was impossible to tell how deep it was. At its far end was a reticulated blue aurora that seemed to shift and flow in synchronization with my thoughts. For some reason I thought of Laika, and wished again that Jif Gurd hadn’t killed her. The aurora pulsed at my thought, and there was a thump outside the tent—a thump followed by loud barking.

  “Laika?” I said. My voice came out slow and drugged. Balan Thok had her arms around my neck and was licking my face. Dragging her after me, I crawled to the tent flap and peered out. There was a dog-shaped glob of light out there, barking as if its throat would burst.

  I was scared, and I let Balan Thok pull me back into the tent. The full intoxication took over. Balan Thok undid my trousers and aroused me to madness. Vlad and the old man were lying at the edge of the Thunder-God hole, staring down into the growing blue light and screaming to it. I threw Balan Thok down between them, and we began coupling savagely. Each spastic twitch of our bodies was a coded message, a message that Vlad and Jif Gurd’s howls were reinforcing. Our filth and drug-madness became a sacred ritual, an Eleusinian mystery. Before too long, I could hear the voice of ...

  God? No ... not god, and not the Devil. The voice was from the blue light in the pit. And it wasn’t a voice. It was the same, somehow, as the aurora I’d seen last night. It liked dogs, and it liked me. Behind all the frenzy, I was very happy there, shuddering on Balan Thok. Time passed.

  At some point there was more barking outside, and the old man screamed. I saw his face, underlit by the pulsing blue glow from the Thunder-God hole. He bounded over me, waving his bloody knife overhead.

  I heard a gunshot from the tent-door, and someone came crashing in. A person led by a bright blue dog. Captain Nina. The dog had helped her find us. The dog ran over and snapped at me, forcing me away from Balan Thok and the hole. I got hold of Vlad’s leg, and dragged him along with me. There was another shot, and then Nina was struggling hand to hand with the old man. Vlad staggered to his feet and tried to join the fight. But I got my arms around his thin chest and kept backing away.

  Jif Gurd and Nina were near the hole’s jumpy light now, and I could see that they both were wounded. She had shot the old man twice with a pistol, but he had his knife, and the strength of a maniac. The two of them wrestled hand-to-hand, clawing and screaming. Now Balan Thok rose to her knees and began slashing at Nina’s legs with a short dagger. Nina’s pistol pointed this way and that, constantly about to fire.

  I dragged Vlad backwards, and we tore through the rotting leather of the yurt’s wall. An aurora like last night’s filled the sky. Now that I wasn’t staring into the hole I could think a little bit. So many things swirled in my mind, but one fact above all stuck out. We had found an alien artifact. If only it was a rocket-drive, then all of the terrible mess in the yurt could be forgotten ...

  An incandescent blast lifted Vlad and me
off the ground and threw us five meters. The entire yurt leapt into the sky. It was gone instantly, leaving a backward meteor trail of flaming orange in the sudden blackness of the sky. The sodden earth convulsed. From overhead, a leaping sonic boom pressed Vlad and me down into the muck where we had landed. I passed out.

  Vlad shook me awake after many hours. The sun was still burning above the horizon. It was another of those dizzying, endless, timeless summer days. I tried to remember what had happened. When my first memories came I retched in pain.

  Vlad had started a roaring campfire from dead, mummified branches. “Have some tea, Nikita,” he said, handing me a tin army mug filled with hot, yellow liquid.

  “No,” I choked weakly. “No more.”

  “It’s tea,” Vlad said. I could tell his mind was running a mile a minute. “Take it easy. It’s all over. We’re alive, and we’ve found the star-drive. That blast last night!” His face hardened a bit. “Why didn’t you let me try to save poor Nina?”

  I coughed and wiped my bloodshot, aching eyes. I tried to fit my last twelve hallucinated hours into some coherent pattern. “The yurt,” I croaked. “The star-drive shot it into the sky? That really happened?”

  “Nina shot the old man. She burst in with a kind of ghost-dog? She burst in and the old man rushed her with his knife. When the drive went off, it threw all of them into the sky. Nina, the two Evenks, even the two reindeer and the dog. We were lucky—we were right at the edge of the ellipse.”

  “I saved you, Vlad. There was no way to save Nina, too. Please don’t blame me.” I needed his forgiveness because I felt guilty. I had a strange feeling that it had been my wish of finding a rocket drive that had made the artifact send out the fatal blast.

  Vlad sighed and scratched his ribs. “Poor Ninotchka. Imagine how it must have looked. Us rolling around screaming in delirium and you having filthy sex with that Evenk girl ...” He frowned sadly. “Not what you expect from Soviet scientists.”

  I sat up to look at the elliptical blast area where the yurt had been. Nothing was left of it but a few sticks and thongs and bits of hide. The rest was a muddy crater. “My God, Vlad.”

  “It’s extremely powerful,” Vlad said moodily. “It wants to help us Earthlings, I know it does. It saved Laika, remember?”

  “It saved her twice. Did you see the blue dog last night?”

  Vlad frowned impatiently. “I saw lots of things last night, Nikita, but now those things are gone.”

  “The drive is gone?”

  “Oh no,” Vlad said. “I dug it out of the crater this morning.”

  He gestured at our booty. It was sitting in the mud behind him. It was caked with dirt and weird, powdery rust. It looked like an old tractor crankcase.

  “Is that it?” I said doubtfully.

  “It looked better this morning,” Vlad said. “It was made of something like jade and was shaped like a vacuum cleaner. With fins. But if you take your eyes off it, it changes.”

  “No. Really?”

  Vlad said, “It’s looked shabby ever since you woke up. It’s picking up on your shame. That was really pretty horrible last night, Nikita; I’d never thought that you ...”

  I poked him sharply to shut him up. We looked at each other for a minute, and then I took a deep breath. “The main thing is that we’ve got it, Vlad. This is a great day in history.”

  “Yeah,” agreed Vlad, finally smiling. The drive looked shinier now. “Help me rig up a sling for it.”

  With great care, as much for our pounding heads as for the Artifact itself, we bundled it up in Vlad’s coat and slung it from a long, crooked shoulder-pole.

  My head was still swimming. The mosquitoes were a nightmare. Vlad and I climbed up and over the splintery, denuded trunks of dead pines, stopping often to wheeze on the damp, metallic air. The sky was very clear and blue, the color of Lake Baikal. Sometimes, when Vlad’s head and shoulders were outlined against the sky, I seemed to see a faint Kirlian shimmer traveling up the shoulder-pole to dance on his skin.

  Panting with exhaustion, we stopped and gulped down more rations. Both of us had the trots. Small wonder. We built a good sooty fire to keep the bugs off for a while. We threw in some smoky green boughs from those nasty-looking young pines. Vlad could not resist the urge to look at it again.

  We unwrapped it. Vlad stared at it fondly. “After this, it will belong to all mankind,” he said. “But for now it’s ours!”

  It had changed again. Now it had handles. They looked good and solid, less rusty than the rest. We lugged it by the handles until we got within earshot of the base-camp.

  The soldiers heard our yells and three of them came to help us.

  They told us about Nina on our way back. All day she had paced and fidgeted, worrying about Vlad and trying to talk the soldiers into a rescue mission. Finally, despite their good advice, she had set off after us alone.

  The aurora fireworks during the night had terrified the Uzbeks. They were astonished to see that we had not only survived, but triumphed.

  But we had to tell them that Nina was gone.

  Sergeant Mukhamed produced some 200-proof ethanol from the de-icing tank of his byutor. Weeping unashamedly, we toasted the memory of our lost comrade, State Security Captain Nina Igorovna Bogulyubova. After that we had another round, and I made a short but dignified speech about those who fall while storming the cosmos. Yes, dear Captain Nina was gone; but thanks to her sacrifice, we, her comrades, had achieved an unprecedented victory. She would never be forgotten. Vlad and I would see to that.

  We had another toast for our cosmic triumph. Then another for the final victory. Then we were out of drinks.

  The Uzbeks hadn’t been idle while Vlad and I had been gone. They didn’t have live ammo, but a small bear had come snuffling round the camp the day before and they’d managed to run over him with one of the byutors. The air reeked of roast bear meat and dripping fat. Vlad and I had a good big rack of ribs, each. The ribs in my chunk were pretty broken up, but it was still tasty. For the first time, I felt like a real hero. Eating bear meat in Siberia. It was a heck of a thing.

  Now that we were back to the byutors, our problems were behind us and we could look forward to a real “rain of gold.” Medals, and plenty of them. Big dachas on the Black Sea, and maybe even lecture tours in the West, where we could buy jazz records. All the Red Army boys figured they had big promotions coming.

  We broke camp and loaded the carriers. Vlad wouldn’t join in the soldiers’ joking and kidding. He was still mooning about Nina. I felt sorry for Vlad. I’d never liked Nina much, and I’d been against her coming from the first. The wilderness was no place for females, and it was no wonder she’d come to grief. But I didn’t point this out to Vlad. It would only have made him feel worse. Besides, Nina’s heroic sacrifice had given a new level of deep moral meaning to our effort.

  We packed the drive away in the first byutor where Vlad and I could keep an eye on it. Every time we stopped to refuel or study the maps, Vlad would open its wrappings and have a peek. I teased him about it. “What’s the matter, comrade? Want to chain it to your leg?”

  Vlad was running his hand over and over the drive’s rusty surface. Beneath his polishing strokes, a faint gleam of silver had appeared. He frowned mightily. “Nikita, we must never forget that this is no soulless machine. I’m convinced it takes its form from what we make of it. It’s a frozen idea—that’s it true essence. And if you and I forget it, or look aside, it might just vanish.”

  I tried to laugh him out of it, but Vlad was serious. He slept next to it both nights, until we reached the rail spur.

  We followed the line to the station. Vlad telegraphed full particulars to Moscow and I sent along a proud report to Higher Circles.

  We waited impatiently for four days. Finally a train arrived. It contained some rocket-drive technicians from the Baikonur Cosmodrome, and two dozen uniformed KGB. Vlad and I were arrested. The Red Army boys were taken in custody by some Red Army brass. Even the
Latvian who ran the station was arrested.

  We were kept incommunicado in a bunk car. Vlad remained cheerful, though. “This is nothing,” he said, drawing on his old jailbird’s lore. “When they really mean business, they take your shoelaces. These KGB are just protective custody. After all, you and I have the greatest secret in cosmic history!” And we were treated well—we had red caviar, Crimean champagne, Kamchatkan king crab, blinis with sour cream.

  The drive had been loaded aboard a flatcar and swathed down under many layers of canvas. The train pulled to a halt several times. The window shades on our car were kept lowered, but whenever we stopped, Vlad peeked out. He claimed the rocket specialists were adjusting the load.

  After the second day of travel I had grave doubts about our whole situation. No one had interrogated us; for cosmic heroes, we were being badly neglected. I even had to beg ignominiously for DDT to kill the crab-lice I had caught from Balan Thok. Compared to the mundane boredom of our train confinement, our glorious adventure began to seem absurd. How would we explain our strange decisions—how would we explain what had happened to Nina? Our confusion would surely make it look like we were hiding something.

  §

  Instead of returning in triumph to Kaliningrad, our train headed south. We were bound for Baikonur Cosmodrome, where the rockets are launched. Actually, Baikonur is just the “security name” for the installation. The real town of Baikonur is five hundred kilometers away. The true launch site is near the village of Tyuratam. And Tyuratam, worse luck, is even more of a hick town than Baikonur.

  This cheerless place lies on a high plain north of Afghanistan and east of the Aral Sea. It was dry and hot when we got there, with a cease-less irritating wind. As they marched us out of the train, we saw engineers unloading the drive. With derricks.

  Over the course of the trip, as the government rocket experts fiddled with it, the drive had expanded to fit their preconceptions. It had grown to the size of a whole flatcar. It had become a maze of crooked hydraulics, with great ridged black blast-nozzles. It was even bound together with those ridiculous hoops.